Now that we are on the other side of the mountain...

I figure it is time to catch up on this blog. The last 3 months have been crazy, but worth it! After coming home from Orlando, Ray was brought up to Shands for his pre-transplant work-up. We thought that he would be going home for a couple weeks before they would let him go to transplant, but he basically had one weekend and then he was admitted for the actual transplant on February 13th.

The first couple weeks went quite smoothly. He received his chemo conditioning regimen up til the 17th and then he received his brother's cells on the 18th. He went the first 8 days without showing any real complications. I think we both began to relax a bit, and then, in a one-two punch, Ray developed pneumonia and had to be placed on extremely high doses of prednisone. By this time, he was feeling the effects of the chemo and his kidneys started shutting down. As a result, he was in agonizing pain and was placed on high doses of morphine. Between the halucinations from the morphine, the pain the lack of sleep (he was placed on oxygen, but they did not hook it up to his bipap machine for 72 hours), and the high doses of prednisone, he went into drug induce psychosis for about 4 days.

In the middle of this, my company decided that due to the state of the economy, they would have to cut the sales team outside of California. We quickly negotiated a contract for me to be an independent sales consultant, but, I lost my base pay. I think Ray was secretly relieved that I would not have to answer to an employer for a while so that I could focus on him. I, on the otherhand, was not so relieved. I had left a stable position (albeit, lower paying) to work for my former boss from Pearson again (he had recruited me to this new company) and to represent a product that I was extremely excited about. For now, I am continuing to work the deals that I had developed with TeleParent, while passively looking at other opportunities.

I think that week was an all time low for Ray and I. God must have realized that we needed some hope, especially as we had hundreds of people praying for us, and Ray quickly turned around the following week. By the following Monday, the doctors were saying that Ray would be getting out of the hospital by the end of the week.

On Thursday, March 12th, one month after being admitted to the hospital, Ray was discharged from the hospital. He moved into the apartment that we had rented in Gainesville. For the last week and a half, he has steadily improved, even getting a pass last weekend from coming into the hospital. Our kids came up to visit, and while it was a bit overwhelming for Ray, he was very happy to see them after a month.

Today we came in (Tuesday) and they said that he does not have to come back in until Friday. Whoohoo!!! His counts are holding and he is doing great.