The second phase of my bone marrow/stem cell transplant starts tomorrow, a difficult and challenging four weeks. The second phase consists of big doses of two chemotherapy agents, one on Monday and one on Wednesday, which will entirely kill off my existing bone marrow, and thus eliminate my body’s ability to make blood cells. On Friday, the stem cells that were harvested from my blood 10 days ago will be […]
From 7 to 10 days after a big chemo blast, blood cell counts hit what the doctors call “nadir” — their very lowest points. That happened for me 2 days ago (for my white blood cells, readings of 200, 200, 500, and 900 per uL from 7/7 to 7/10) and yesterday (for my platelets, readings of 30,000, 16,000, 9,000, and 16,000 per uL). These are expected, if scary-dangerous, readings. The […]
I thought I’d give you all a short update on my status. My brain feels like it’s at 60% capacity and the days since I started this process have started to run together, so bear with me. The short version is that the past 5 days have been very difficult for me, even though, from what I can tell, I’ve managed to avoid the worst side effects of the chemo […]
Thanks to everyone who left such sweet, kind, and supportive words in response to my post yesterday on Facebook. Some of you might be interested in hearing a little more about the specifics of the bone marrow transplant (BMT) I’ve started. The cancer I have (multiple myeloma) is a cancer that affects plasma cells. Like all blood cells, plasma cells are produced by bone marrow. The purpose of the BMT […]
Today marks a week that I’ve been off the chemotherapy drugs I’d been taking for four months, and I’m finally starting to feel more normal, almost back to my old self. I knew the chemo drugs were causing me fatigue (which is now thankfully almost completely gone), but I didn’t realize how much they were affecting my brain. As it slowly started to lift, I realized that I’d been living […]
Friday I took my camera out for the first time in awhile, and downloaded those pictures plus some others that had been in the camera for awhile. Here are a few for your viewing pleasure.
So many times during the past 3 months I’ve started to feel better — and then started to hope that I’d turned a corner — only to regress in a day or two or three to a bad place again. So I’m hesitant to report that things are going much better the last 10 days, and will likely continue that way for a while. A good example of the “You […]
Many cashiers these days simply don’t know how to deal with change, something that I could do as a 16-year old clerk back at the Witte Drug Store.
Some of you have noted that comments you make on the SSS Blog don’t show up on the site right away. That is, as they say, a feature, not a bug. I’ve set the site up to require all comments to be moderated (i.e., approved by me before they show up) in light of past experiences in which too many comments were posted by bots from web sites trying to […]
Today’s update is brought to you via two numbers: 33.88 and 1.1. 33.88 is the latest result from the “free Kappa light chain” blood test I take every three weeks. Because the abnormal plasma cells in my type of multiple myeloma produce an excess of what are called Kappa light chain proteins (which normally join with “heavy” protein chains to form immunoglobulins that fight infections), a measurement of the level […]