Wednesday and Thursday, February 7th and 8th - Day 26 and 27 in Hangzhou, China

Hello again,

Tori's fifth and final SCT went very smoothly Wednesday afternoon. This time it was purely a spinal injection of 10 million cord stem cells. She slept on her back for three hours afterward then woke up and watched a couple of movies in the DVD player that we positioned vertically for her. We were able to move her and elevate her head again after the six hour minimum time frame. Thankfully it cooled down outside Wednesday and Thursday because Tuesday afternoon it was quite hot in Tori's room... They did find us a fan though and it helped alot. Tori is very uncomfortable when she is hot and her body temperature seems to rise much quicker and higher than the rest of us and that tends to greatly worry the staff here.

Tori had PT Wednesday morning only due to the afternoon SCT and Thursday was a normal therapy day complete with PT, acupuncture and EMT. The PT room is now pretty busy during the morning as there are three additional patients from Hungary and another one from the USA is arriving on Saturday. All of the activity in the room seems to help Tori because she is watching everything else going on and not really focusing on what James is doing to her. Tori has alot of new friends here!! :-)

I also finally met 7 year old Maya and her mother on Wednesday. Actually, Maya introduced herself to me by walking over to me on her own and placing her 'etch and sketch' right on my lap where she proceeded to draw for me. She is a sweetheart!! :-) This is Maya's second trip and I spoke with her mother Belle(?) about her improvements. Maya didn't experience any real improvements until 2 to 5 months after her first SCT trip. Maya has epilepsy and before the SCT she was having many seizures each day. Now has has basically none and her medicine intake has been drastically reduced as well. She speaks and concentrates better and now completes puzzles that were an impossibility before. She is also stronger and she has more stamina, balance and coordination. So now Maya has returned for her second round of SCT and they are hoping for even greater progress and improvement. And now we are hoping and praying as well.

Jon Hakim from Beike arrived on Wednesday as well and I was able to meet with him and Dr. Sean Hu who is the Chairman of Beike Biotechnology and leads the company. Jon is the director of the foreign patient services department and helped in facilitating Tori's trip to Hangzhou for SCT. They just finished up an interview with BusinessWeek that gives a fair description of the operations and challenges of the company even though there is a drastic error where 'cord cells' was replaced with 'fetal cells'... Of course that is a GIANT error especially in the USA. Both were interested and listened to my opinions and I told them they should prioritize the funding of an internationally standardized, sanctioned and accepted clinical trial(s) as NUMBER ONE on their list. They must do this soon to help validate their SCT research and procedures globally. It is a necessity for any acknowledgment by the community of medical professionals. They should hire an independent and totally third party team from the USA or another Western country to to do the clinical trial(s) on a cross section of patient types and injuries or diseases. In the USA they are only doing this on animals at this point and have a minuscule set of specific studies on humans. I'm as pro American as they come but I hope while we 'fiddle around' and stifle ourselves in the USA that China and others 'leap frog' us on stem cell research and the beneficial uses because of it. Competition is GOOD!!! The bottom line is that WE CANNOT AFFORD TO WAIT IN HELPING TORI!!! And there are millions of others who cannot wait either... Having adequate stem cell treatments in the USA twenty years from now will be nice and all but how will that help Tori?!?! Enough said on this topic which I obviously have very strong feelings about.

Wednesday evening I had dinner at a Chinese restaurant with Jon, Grace, many other staff members and some of the patient caregivers as well. It was an entertaining and fun evening and it was nice to see many of them outside the work environment. Maria and I did another afternoon trip into downtown Hangzhou to have lunch and finish up some more shopping. We have the bus routes nailed down well but I doubt we will be going back because the crowds are just enormous and insane now!!! Schools are now out for the holiday season, the buses are fully packed and traffic is at a standstill much of the time now... I'm also getting a little worried about the airport crowds at this point...

There was another article about Tori yesterday in the BYU Daily Universe and we are lining up followup articles in the other newspapers as well. Kirk Green from Layton, Utah is also in China receiving SCT for his spinal cord injury in Shenzhen. Here is a great article on Kirk's progress so far during his trip. Chuck Melton was mentioned in the BusinessWeek article and his progress and trip is detailed here.

Alright, I guess it's bed time for me!!! Thanks again for all of the love, prayers, thoughts and support as none of this would really be possible without it.

Sincerely,

The Schmanski's