Rabbit flu

I want to thank Harriet for her excellent job at teaching Bernie how to type. With her help, he took over here in my absence and carried on nicely. However, I’m not sure about letting him go on Twitter. He tends to blab.

Anyway, I survived the ATG treatment at Shands and I’m recovering now at home. According to Wendy, my new transplant coordinator, it feels like you’ve been run over by a truck. She might be holding back a little on that description, but you get the idea. One of the doctors at Shands explained it so even I could understand. And also cleared up another mystery: why everyone at Shands calls ATG rabbit juice.

T-cells or lymphocytes are a central part of our immune systems, the soldiers in our blood who fight intruders such as bacteria and viruses -- and foreign bodies like transplanted organs. When I went into rejection it was because, despite my anti-immune medications, my t-cells – smart little devils -- had figured out that my transplanted lungs were not natives. So, they attacked.

You’ll recall that the doctors made two attempts to correct the rejection using the high powered steroid Solumedrol and both were unsuccessful. So, more powerful medicine was indicated. We needed something that would attack my t-cells. And this is where it gets interesting.

Some really bright medical researcher figured this one out. All animals have immune systems. So why not inject another species with human t-cells? Then their immune systems would develop anti-bodies to attack the intruders, the human t-cells. And then we could extract the anti-bodies from the other species and inject them into the human patient with rejection. The anti-bodies would attack the t-cells and the rejection would stop.

I don’t know why the researcher picked rabbits, but there must have been a lot of those bunnies in the truck that hit me. I may be the only person in Orlando with rabbit flu.