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Monday, December 6, 2010

Go NK Cells, Go!

Tomorrow is the 7th day of December.
Tomorrow is exactly 6 months from the date of Emilie's diagnosis (7th of June).
Tomorrow is the most important part of our St. Jude treatment.

Today, I had the NK (natural killer) cell collection process which turned out to be a piece of cake; a four hour piece of cake.  The procedure filtered every ounce of my blood and my NK cells were "harvested".   The cells will be processed tonight and tomorrow morning with Emilie's infusion being tomorrow afternoon.  The infusion is actually about 5-10mL of cells that will be pushed through her line in about three minutes.  Pretty easy!

My NK cell understanding is this...Emilie's NK cells did not see her cancer cells as "enemies", so they were allowed to grow crazy in her body.  My NK cells are just different enough to see her cancer cells as "enemies".  So, if there are any cancer cells that survived the chemo attack, my NK cells will seek and destroy them.  Go NK cells go!

We are very grateful that this treatment was available and that we had a parental match.  God is so good!
Please pray that 1.) the NK cells will identify, attack and kill any leftover cancer cells and that 2.) Emilie will not have any adverse reactions to the infusion.
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2 comments:

Eva said...

I for one will be praying like crazy for Emilie tomorrow. Go NK cells go!

Linda said...

Today is the "big day" and you know we will be praying hard for NK cell success!

We all love you all.