Frist trip to All Children's

Today was a busy day. We had a meeting at All Children’s Hospital in St. Petersburg. This is the hospital that will do the Bone Marrow Transplant. We met Mati, who will be Jordan’s transplant coordinator, Dr. Petrovic, and Bethany the Nurse Practitioner. We had a long meeting with this group to get a general first understanding of how a BMT happens. Jordan has to be in remission for 4 weeks prior to the BMT. She will be in the hospital for a minimum of 6 weeks and will have to undergo a High Dose Chemotherapy session that usually lasts about 8 days. At this time her body will be extremely sensitive to infection. The hospital rooms are high tech and don’t allow any outside air into the room and all items brought to the room have to be cleaned before they can be brought in. They have to be cleaned right outside of the room, by one of the people that work on the floor. We were given so much other information, it still needs time to be re-read and absorbed. I’m sure we will have many questions after it settles in a little bit.

They told us they have not yet found an unrelated adult donor, however they found a Cord Blood Unit that looks like a potential match and it has enough cells. She’s lucky she is short and only weighs a bit over 100 pounds. Cord cells are not usually used on teenagers or adults because there aren’t normally enough cells in the unit to supply someone’s body weight. This particular donor has over 3 million cells and Jordan needs 3 million for her body weight. We are crossing our fingers that this cord unit will work. Dr. Petrovic likes to have two cord units, one as a back up, just in case. They have reserved this Cord Unit for her and will continue to look for other donors until she is ready for transplant.

After the visit at ACH, we had to go to Jordan’s hospital (SJH) to have labs done. She hadn’t had labs since she went home on Sunday, so we needed to find out if she needed platelets.

Our biggest news of the day was that Jordan is actually in remission. The test from the bone marrow aspiration from last Wednesday was negative for Leukemia cells. The results on the Philadelphia Chromosome are not back yet. She technically has to be in remission for both the Leukemia and the Philly Chromosome to be in complete remission.

Her labs came back and her platelets were 60. We were so surprised. They have to be greater than 75 to start chemo again. They set up an appointment to come back Friday morning for labs one more time. They expect them to be higher than 75 on Friday and they have already scheduled her for her second set of Chemo to start next Monday, March 20th. This next session will last 8 days and the only new drug that will be added is Gleevec. Gleevec is a fairly new drug that specifically targets the Philadelphia Chromosome. We are excited about this drug because we have been told by several doctors that it has revolutionized the treatment of Cancer in this situation.

This next set of Chemo is not the 8 days session before transplant. They now have to keep doing Chemo to keep her in remission until she goes to transplant. She cannot have the BMT until she is in remission for 4 weeks and has a suitable donor.