For anyone who wants to check in on Ava, we thought this would be an easy way to tell her story...

Friday, November 11, 2011

Im just going to do a quick update and try to explain the latest. As I have said before, I am horrible at trying to repeat what the doctor tells us...
All lymphocytes are made up of T-cells, and B-cells. Ava's issue is her T-cells. Her T-cell engraftments came back showing 80% of her own lymphocytes in her blood, which is not great :(  After having her lymphocytes wiped out from the campath and since receiving Audrey's blood, the lymphocytes are very slowly retuning to normal counts in the blood (which is normal, they can take months and months to reach normal counts). There is some hope right now that since her overall count of lymphcytes in the blood is so small, that this engraftment test is not really accurate just yet since its reading from such a small sample. The doctor would like to see what these engraftment tests show after she has a higher volume of them in the blood...which takes time. The hope is that as she makes more lymphocytes, the majority of them will be Audrey's coming in and killing off any remaining cells of Ava's. If we see a pattern in the wrong direction over the next 3 weeks or so, we will most likely have to repeat the DLI.  Hopefully as the lymphocytes come back, they will be Audrey's and they will take over...hopefully.
I know how confusing it all sounds, but the gist of it is... more of Ava's own = bad :(
And all of Audrey's = good :)
Now, there is some good news here,  all other areas of her blood are all donor cells which is great! As long as we can get rid of her stupid little T-cells, she will be 100% engrafted.
This is all very tiring and upsetting. All we want is the "ok" to go home, but news like this just sets us back longer. We are hoping and praying for good news in the next couple weeks...its all we can do right now.

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