Today's clinical trial injection is designed to mirror the first day's injection in terms of tests. That means about an hour of testing before the injection, and then 7 hours of observation along with frequent testing of vitals and blood samples. When we arrived at Mayo Clinic the staff gave Karen a tiara to wear, and the room had Happy Birthday decorations up. A little later a bunch of the staff came by with a fancy looking chocolate cupcake with butter creamcheese frosting from Gigi's Cupcakes - the frosting's as tall as the cupcake itself - and a Happy Birthday card signed by everyone, then sang happy birthday to her. The room we get is always a private room with a bed in it Karen can lay down in. The room has a TV with hundreds of channels, so there's always something to watch. Today we have 6 different channels of Olympics for Karen to bounce between, which keeps things interesting.
For the third week in a row Monday's injection was hard on Karen. It's the same injection each time, so we're not exactly sure what's going on. I think the extra time off makes the body react a little more strongly to the injection. The shots leave Karen pretty worn out, so another possibility could be that the Monday's sleepiness makes the Wednesday injection easier to sleep through, and Wednesday's does the same for Friday. Karen missed breakfast on Monday, so her theory is that perhaps she's just missing breakfast on Mondays and it hits her harder if she hasn't eaten. Either way she continues to recover quicker from the injections, and was feeling pretty good Tuesday.
Karen's platelets have continued to test way below reference range, and now, Monday's blood work shows there's been a sudden drop in her white blood cell count. They've recommended we avoid places with a lot of people, and that if we do go out in public, to wear a mask. We only have one more treatment before Karen's week off, so hopefully her white blood cell count recovers quickly so we can get out and do things.
