No hair...again

We met with the transplant doctor on Monday, and finalized plans to do a donor lymphocyte infusion (DLI) rather than a transplant. That means that Tony will only have one more round of consolidation chemo, and won't have anymore chemo after that! Once he recovers from this next round of chemo, which should start July 21st, we'll move forward with the DLI. We're still working on the timing on the DLI because they need to schedule a time for Kevin, Tony's original bone marrow donor, to donate some lymphocytes. This process should be much easier on Kevin than the original harvest of marrow. It will be similar to donating plasma or dialysis. The idea behind the DLI is that they give Tony Kevin's lymphocytes (a type of white blood cell) to help activate Tony's immune system. They should attack any remaining cancer cells left after doing all of this chemo. They typically do 3 rounds of DLI about a month apart. If Tony starts to develop some GVHD (graft vs. host disease) then they stop the DLI. Here, having a little bit of GVHD is a good thing because that means they've activated Tony's immune system to a point where it will start attacking the cancer cells, and they won't give him anymore lymphocytes. We are so grateful to not have to do another bone marrow transplant and are praying for the DLI to work.

Tony's hair has started falling out again. It was getting to the point where we could pull it out in chunks again. So it was time to shave it off again. Here are some lovely pictures with his bald spots.