Day -3

I forgot to mention they gave me methylprednisolone after I woke up from the Demerol yesterday. After everything calmed down, I felt really good. Got a great night of sleep, and had a pretty good breakfast. The Marinol seems to help a good bit. Dr. Burt decided to start Cyclosporine and Cellcept, two anti-rejection drugs, today rather than tomorrow. The Cytoxan and premeds went fine again, and I still felt pretty good.

They gave Benadryl, Tylenol, and an extra steroid, I think methylprednisolone again, for premeds half an hour before. I stuck with saltine crackers as a snack to be on the safe side. They had Demerol ready in case, and some other drugs. I was mistaken yesterday about the Campath due to the side effects and the haze from all the drugs. It ran for 2 hours, not 1. I got through that perfectly fine, no symptoms. About 10 or 15 minutes after the Campath finished, I slowly started to get hives. It slowly got worse, and I started getting a sore throat, swollen tongue, tightened throat, tremors, and shortened breaths. They paged Dr. Burt and his nurse, Amy, and called in the attending allergist, and ended up giving me Hydrocortisone, more Benadryl, and Pepcid, to block histamine 2 receptors to make for certain the reaction would stop. Dr. Burt and Amy stayed until things started improving, and it took about 10 minutes. They gave another antibiotic, Tobramycin, as well.They made sure to get an Epipen and anything else bedside just in case. Dr. Burt has his nurse's pages about me forwarded to him, and said to call at any time overnight if anything changes.

They're holding Campath tomorrow. No word about what they'll do in place of it yet. They want to test me for another antibiotic they could ideally add, unrelated to the allergy piece, for another prophylactic measure. I'm allergic to Cefzil and the antibiotic is similar to Cephalosporin so they want to do a skin test and ramp it up to see how it would go. All of the stuff they've given me today, though, could interfere with a possible reaction to it and make the negative (conclusively indicating I'm not allergic) part of the test less certain. But, if I still reacted with a rash after all of this, it would definitely mean I'm allergic. If I can't have that one, there are others that can be used in its place.

A few hours after the major drugs for the major reaction wore off a bit, I slowly started to get more hives. The allergist said they can come and go and didn't want to give more Benadryl hoping for the sake of the antibiotic test, but Dr. Burt said to give more Benadryl, this time orally. It's helping a bit and nothing has gotten worse. They told the nurse to give me the Epipen if anything aside from hives occur. No issues with nausea today. The plan is to do everything else as normal tonight, and keep an eye out for any further of a reaction. I feel a little itchy now but it's definitely tolerable.

The reaction I had yesterday could have been part allergic, and it would only have gotten like this after my body had been exposed to Campath before. All of the extra drugs they gave me yesterday may have masked more of the reaction, too. I think I prefer today's reaction compared to yesterday's. We'll see how things go the rest of the night. My door is staying open and I'm right across from the nurses' station, and they'll be in throughout the night as usual. I'll see Dr. Burt in the morning and find out the new plan. This shouldn't mess up the transplant process, so they should be able to get it done one way or another.