Elizabeth is home!!

Hi Friends,

My apologies for how long it has been since the last update. Since the last email there have been a number of hurdles Elizabeth went through to get to the most exciting piece of news yet…

ELIZABETH IS HOME! Yesterday we packed up the car with everything from her 7 week stay at OHSU and came home. She’s still recovering her immune system, but she’s able to be outside, see people in small groups, and get stronger while being in her own space.

A quick recap of things since the last email: after the last round of chemo, Elizabeth got her third bone marrow biopsy. The biopsy showed that she was in pseudo-remission. Remission is technically achieved when the cancer cells are 5% or less in the bone marrow and when her hematocrit (red blood cells), platelets (the things that allow you to clot), and neutrophils (the white blood cells that form your immune system) are above a certain level. Chemotherapy causes those three things to go way down, so doctors often wait until those are recovered to see if the cancer levels have stayed down as the blood and immune system grow back.

In Elizabeth’s case, the second round of chemo knocked her cancer cells all the way down to 3% in the bone marrow!! While her counts hadn’t fully recovered, this was still great news because it meant that the cancer responded to the re-induction chemo as the doctors hoped.

Elizabeth waited for a few weeks after those results to build back her immune system in the hospital. She finally got the news yesterday that she was clear to come home!

We’ve now entered a bit of a waiting period as the doctors try to find Elizabeth a bone marrow donor. Elizabeth will go in regularly to get labs taken, and next week for another bone marrow biopsy. She will likely go in for one or two rounds of consolidation chemo while she waits. Consolidation chemo aims to keep the cancer cells low and is generally a 5 day stay in the hospital. After the 5 days, she’ll be able to come home to recover.

Some preliminary results came back from the bone marrow donor search. While Elizabeth had large pool of initial matches, they have found that she has a rare antigen in her blood that makes finding a match more difficult. If you’re interested in becoming a bone marrow donor, you can request a cheek-swab kit at bethematch.org!

Since Elizabeth has returned home, she will start to buy food, pay bills, and return to some kind of routine. The donations everyone has made to help pay for these costs, the food people have brought, and the thoughtful gifts people have sent are helping so much. Thank you to everyone, Elizabeth is deeply grateful. I also want to say what a gift it is to see how many people continue to reach out and support Elizabeth and those around her — I’m thrilled that she’s home and also relieved to know that she has so many people by her side for the next chapters of her treatment.

The link to the GoFundMe is https://www.gofundme.com/elizabeths-leukemia-recovery, and the MealTrain page is here: https://www.mealtrain.com/trains/l7ze06. Now that Elizabeth is home we’re hopefully going to start doing a bit more cooking and enjoying some of fresh foods of the season so easy to wash fruits and veggies are really appreciated!