Day -3. The past few days have been quite challenging, hence why I haven’t posted anything since being admitted to the hospital for my second transplant. Right now, I’m sitting in bed getting my second of three doses of rabbit ATG, and later tonight around 10PM, I’ll be getting my third of four doses of fludarabine and first of two doses of cyclophosphamide (plus mesna to prevent bladder damage, which if you recall = tons of peeing, all the time).

Yesterday and all of this morning were hard. During and after my first dose of rabbit ATG, I had really, really bad rigor (basically body shakes similar to if you were plunged into an ice bath, teeth chattering and all) and I kept spiking fevers with painful headaches and body aches. All night long I was toggling back and forth between being too “cold” (even though I was feverish) and being too hot. Rigor is a common side effect of ATG chemo, which I knew would be a possibility. Since I didn’t react poorly to it last time I was in the hospital, it seemed like I wouldn’t have a bad reaction to it this time — turns out that’s not true. To help calm the shaking down, I kept getting and am continuing to get doses of demerol which works like magic and stops the rigor pretty quickly.

My doctor thinks the reason why I’m reacting so sensitively to the ATG this time is because my immune system is basically “primed” to responding to the ATG. There are memory B cells and T cells that, when challenged with ATG, have been upregulated and induce a massive cytokine storm which is what’s causing the fevers, achiness, and rigor.

Moving forward today and tomorrow, my care team has decided to drastically up the ante on medications and significantly slow down the rate of ATG infusion. So far today, I’ve been doing much better than yesterday. I’m getting loads of steroids. opiates, and antihistamines on a schedule to hopefully reduce the discomfort of the whole chemo process. I’m hoping that because the chemo is really taking my body to town, the stem cell graft will hold and flourish happily in my beat down body.

In other news, Ricky has been with me here this whole weekend and we’ve binge watched six of the eight Harry Potter movies. What a great way to pass the time. 🙂