December 21, 2011 – Margaret and Riley Update

Well I have good news all the way around.  Margaret had a PET scan today and it showed absolutely nothing!  Complete remission is what the doctor said and he was surprised that it worked this fast.  Everyone is pleased with this news.  She will have to continue for three more cycles of chemo to make sure they get it all, sometimes what is left is to small to be detected by the PET scan and they just want to make sure.  The transplant docs told her that people who get PTLD almost never 'reject' because one of the causes is that she was so immunosuppressed, they antirejection drugs were working to well.  Also the odds of her getting PTLD again after all the chemo cycles is 'infinitesimally small' (thank heavens for spell checker).  After she is done with the remaining rounds of chemo she has to go back for checkups every three months for a while.  ‘For a while’ has yet to be determined but we will take it.

As far as Riley goes his platelets are continuing to climb, we are up to 42K of them and apparently he has some big ones which the machine does not count.  This is considered normal and not unusual for dogs to have some really big platelets.  Since they can’t be counted they are not positive what his real count is but they know it is higher than 42K.  Assuming there are no bad changes he is going to come home tomorrow on a bunch of oral meds.  He will have to go back next week for blood work to get his blood counts and another measure of his liver enzymes.  Speaking of liver enzymes, his are starting to come down and if they get close to normal by mid next week they will probably not do a biopsy since whatever we are doing is working, if they are still high they will do a biopsy when his platelets get high enough to do it safely.  Pretty darn good since last week his odds of survival were not good.

So the bottom line to all of this is we should all be home for Christmas, actually we should all be home tomorrow!!  And that my friends is what I call a Merry Christmas!!