Today shanean's white cell counts are at 2.8 so things are definitely on the up - the doctors seem even a little surprised at how well things have gone - christene's cells seem to be doing the trick. She feels much better - sores going away and is able to eat again (and beat me at scrabble but I let her do that)
Tomorrow she will come off the iv immunity suppressants and go on to oral tablets and if things go well she should be looking at going home towards the end of next week which will be exactly a month in hospital for this cycle

From now on the risk of graft vs host disease kicks in. Around half of transplant patients will get this disease and around 1 in 5 will die from it. It is the donors cells attacking Shanean as foreign. If she gets it the main question will be how severe it is - too much is life threatening but too little means the tumors have a higher chance of growing back. Therefore there is a middle ground where we would like Shanean to get a mild dose of it, as the donor cells then actually attack the cancer as well (graft vs tumor effect). A fine line to be walking