Sujata is home once again after a few difficult days at Mount Sinai. The doctors took care of her infection rather quickly, stabilized her condition and started a series of intensive tests for two days, including CAT scans and endoscopies, and other procedures to rule out complications from the transplant. Most of the results were clean, but to be on the safe side the doctors made a several changes in her medication, primarily to step up the fight against GVHD.[...]

Friends, today is exactly a week since Sujata returned home from the hospital and I was hoping to bring you a smiling picture of her with a brand new, colorful head scarf. That will have to wait for a bit. We have run into a small roadblock in Sujata’s recovery process. She had to be re-admitted to the hospital today to fight off what appears to be an infection. We hope this visit will be a short one, just a few days until the doctors get her immunity back in shape.[...]

Home sweet home!! In the picture above Sujata is sporting a big smile as she sits in our bedroom, a place she has missed so much for the past month. Alas, all the hair is gone. It had started to fall off in large clumps, as is common with people on chemo, so the hospital hair dresser shaved it all off. It will grow back soon we hope. In the meantime, Sujata intends to make strong fashion statements about stylish head coverings. So, all you "fashionistas" watch this space for more dazzling and colorful headgear.[...]

Friends who visited Sujata during the past week will probably remember a sign at the entrance to her room, sternly reminding visitors to put on gloves, mask and gowns. Yesterday the attending doctor walked into her room, looked at the latest blood report and with a big smile and asked the nurses to take the sign down. So now visitors can walk into her room without all the elaborate protection, because  her white blood count has moved past the “high infection” zone into safe territory, a sure sign that the transplanted cells have started to function.[...]

Three weekends feels like a longtime, but we know we need to be patient. As we have learnt, bone marrow transplant is a complex procedure and the passage through its complex steps can take unexpected turns. In Sujata’s case we are thankful that there have been very few surprises so far.[...]

Dear friends and well-wishers, this update is coming to you more than half a day late! When I got back from the hospital last night I was too exhausted to sit at my lapto.  I went straight to bed.[...]

In hospital jargon, today is Day + 5, which, as you would have guessed, is the 5 th. day after transplant, and according to her doctors, Sujata’s condition seems to be following a satisfactory path. That is the good news. The bad news is that this path, for the next week or so, will continue to make her increasingly weak and prone to infection. Her white blood count this evening stood at 0.8, a small fraction of a healthy person’s number, making her very vulnerable to infections of all kinds. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex medical process, here’s a layman’s version of what’s going on: the chemo she received last week is reaching her bone marrow just about now and gradually killing off her own stem cells, making room for the transplanted donor cells to set up shop and start producing blood. And when that begins to happen, hopefully in another week to 10 days, the blood counts will start to go up again and Sujata will gradually feel better.[...]