appointment at Vanderbilt

Yesterday Mike and I were in Nashville for my first appointment with a hematologist at Vanderbilt. He's from Louisiana and went to LSU. Good karma there. :-) I liked him and so did Mike. They told me to allow 2 to 3 hours for the appointment. That gave the doc plenty of time to ask me questions and vice versa. He actually took one of the most complete histories of any of the docs I have seen. Now that I have met with him, my case will be presented to the transplant team on the afternoon of Monday, 20 April. When I asked him if he saw any reason they might not put me on the list, he didn't seem to think so.

After that part of the appointment was finished I had blood drawn for lots of tests. Also met with the person who actually does the donor search. Because they already had my earlier HLA tests she was able to do a preliminary search of donors worldwide. The good news is that I have 978 potential donors. Practically what that means is that I am more likely to find a good match. Some people don't come up with any potential donors. She had told me before that a couple of hundred would be great, so 978 is wonderful. It improves my odds. No detail searches will be done until after I am approved by the transplant committee, though.

Now I am in another waiting cycle. I go back to my doc here tomorrow and will likely need platelets and red cells. The Vanderbilt people will get in touch with me next week, probably on Tuesday, but maybe late Monday afternoon to let me know about the decision of the transplant team. Keeping my fingers crossed!