2017: My Singapore M.S. Odyssey

More beautiful flowers from my gorgeous friends 💛 My leg spasticity (stiffness) is much much better (most noticeable when I stretch my quads, and when I'm getting out of bed). I had been noticing this recently, but I've always had good days and bad days, but this has been a prolonged period of 'good', so we can say that it's better. This improvement will help my walking (imagine your legs not really wanting to bend at the knee to take a step. That's spasticity, and it's not helpful). Exciting! Another wig. (Loving having a choice as to how I want my hair to be each day! Sis-tina has requested that I get a rainbow one. We'll see.) Have a great weekend everyone! Rach xx

Beautiful 'welcome home' flowers sent by my even more beautiful friends! xx Hi all! I've had a few people asking whether I know if the treatment 'has worked'. I thought I'd try and answer that question (to the best of my knowledge at the moment!): I think that we can all assume that the treatment is working. This is because we wiped my existing white blood cells (circa 27 July), and related immune system, down to a recorded 0.04 (40 WBC per microlitre, when normal would be 4,500 - 11,000). Putting the stem cells back allowed my bone marrow to start producing WBCs again. However these are naive white blood cells. They don't know anything about anything I had immunity against in the past, or how to suppress viruses that already lie dormant in my body (such as chickenpox). So all of this means that at the moment I'm avoiding large crowds of people (and their (probably inevitable given this winter) sicknesses); I'm basically eating a pregnancy die...

I am home, and it's glorious! I appreciate every little thing about being back, and I don't even care that today's temperature high is 9 degrees celsius. It's welcome, after the ubiquitous heat of Singapore (which has a high today of 33C). Today I want to thank everybody who helped me to get HSCT. The financial contributions were overwhelmingly generous, and by helping me get this treatment you have all quite possibly saved my life (I am not being dramatic, it's true). You have given me a chance to look towards the future with real hope, which means everything, and I really can't thank you enough. Also those of you who donated your time to help with the fundraising effort, who sent messages of support, and generally to all my quiet champions, your stoical comfort helped me so much, particularly when things were difficult. Thank you for reading these (they weren't just excuses to show people pictures of my cat, promise!), I'll still post here every ...