Today was clinic day. I have to keep drinking the three litres of fluid to look after my kidneys. The whole transplant process places the kidneys under stress, and the extra fluid minimizes the long term damage to them; so be it.
My blood results showed an increase in haemoglobin which means my new stem cells are finally making red cells. I hope for a steady increase; the more haemoglobin I have the more I will be able to do. It increased from 8.9 to 9.6 - my "normal" value is 14, so a way to go yet, but if the trend is upwards I am happy. My other blood counts are also fine. Next week I am going to restart taking Glivec (Imatinib). There is not much evidence either way but the most recent study of ALL post-transplant seems to indicate it is advantageous to take it for 2 years.
A while back I posted a puzzle that I thought was really difficult - http://ianandleukaemia.blogspot.com/2011/06/cambridge-cryptogram.html. Patrick and his Dad both came up with solutions, so congratulations to them! Patrick has posted his working as a comment to the above post if you want to see how he did it. Curiously, although his Dad came up with the right answer, the values for the letters are different (Patrick's match the answer in the book). This means that there are multiple solutions! There is one more thing that troubles me; the original puzzle is in a book of IQ puzzles, all the rest of which take only a few minutes to solve. But even with all the help Patrick got from the Internet, he still clearly spent a few hours on the solution, and his Dad spent much longer doing it all manually. Perhaps there is some clever way of solving the problem in a less labour intensive way?
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