I took mum to the haematologist yesterday for her checkup, and got her blood tested. The blood test results were not too bad, although the platelets were still down a bit. The red and white cell numbers are down a bit – but the platelets are in the 70’s whereas 150 is in the normal range. This is an improvement on last tuesday when they were 6, but still a bit low. Mum’s kidneys are still not 100% either, but this is a known issue, and mum just needs to keep up her fluids at this stage. The doctor decided to not do any more lumbar puncture chemo for the moment, and has put mum on weekly blood tests just in case. She is thinking that the results are caused by the chemo.

I was due to go to a conference in the USA over the last weekend this month, but given the results I will not be going. The problem is that the conference is west coast USA, and so there is close to 24 hours from catching the first flight to arriving at the hotel at the other end. So if something happened with mum back here it would be a real problem to get back in an emergency – both with the time for the journey and also the availability of flights.

But I will take a little time off – most likely to Fiji and New Zealand. Still working that one out.