On January 4, Sam had his check up with his transplant team and we found out that he is heading back to oncology! This is good news as it represents a healthy state of affairs w/r/t his post transplant recovery: his cells and metrics are such that they are “good enough” to not need to be monitored monthly from the transplant side of things.  Those same cells still need to be monitored from the oncology side of things though so on February 1,  he will see his favorite Heme-Onc Nurse Practitioner Gina.  We will miss the crew on the transplant side of the clinic: Nurse Heather, Nurse Alison (Sam’s faves for blood draws), Nurse Coordinator Meghan, and the dream team of Nurse Practitioner Karen and Drs. B and K.  Women all!!!! 💪🏼
We have spent the last year with them and they’ve seen him through a lot: conditioning treatments that got rid of his original bone marrow, transplant, graft vs. host disease, and the follow up testing and immune system reconstitution monitoring.
The good news is that the Heme-Onc and BMT nurses’ offices are literally right next door to each other in the clinic so Sam can pop his head in and say hi to any of them when he’s there.
The plan is that we’ll see NP Gina on February 1, have a bunch of tests run at the end of February to get a baseline for all of Sam’s systems (echocardiogram, pulmonary function, thyroid, liver, kidney etc) and then have a 1 year checkup appointment with NP Karen, marking the anniversary of Sam’s transplant, to discuss the results of those tests. From the BMT side of things, Sam will move to survivor/thriver status and learn about “late effects” to watch for from the transplant treatments. From the Heme-Onc side, they will continue to monitor him for any signs of leukemia.  That will include: a 12 month bone marrow aspirate test in March, monthly blood draws to check cell counts, and then I *think* he’ll move to an “every 3 months” schedule for bone marrow testing (15 and 18 months post transplant) and then to a 6 months schedule, which will take him to his 2 year anniversary (still need to confirm this with NP Gina and Dr. S, his heme-onc doctor). 
Somewhere in the next year he will also start getting his vaccines again (all the ones from infancy have to be re-administered. Fun!).  His cell counts haven’t reached the threshold for him to be able to get them yet, but they expect them to get there in the next 3 months or so (he has gotten Covid and the flu vaccine already). 
So that’s the update. 
And the first week of school went well.  Yay!
#FULeukemia#LFGStemCells#TeamSamStrong