Some labs...holding steady, basically

I'm working from two sets of lab numbers, both old. The first set was from last Friday (the 12th) and the second set from this past Tuesday (the 16th).

From the pull on the 12th, my IgG was at 623, with an M-spike of 0.27. That's down, and that's not bad...although it ain't 0.0 yet, dammit!!

From the pull on the 16th, my IgG was at 580, with an M-spike of 0.29.

So what I take from this is there is a rounding error going on, and I currently have an M-spike of 0.3.

Other numbers are good to very good. My white count is 9.6, which could be a little high in response to the last of that dreadful cough (which is now gone). Platelets have recovered to 175, which is normal. Albumin is 4.0 now, which is good. Liver numbers, even, are settling down, which is good. All my electrolytes are good.

The only things still out of whack, really, are my red counts. Hemoglobin is only 9.9. That will come up eventually, or I'm sure there are injections to spur red blood cell growth but we won't worry about that right now. We have another three weeks or so of recovery before I subject my marrow to the final round of chemo so we'll watch and see how the counts recover in the meantime.

Meanwhile, we'll watch that damn M-spike. If I can get it under 0.2 before I get back, then I feel like it is on the path to complete remission still. I just don't want to see a plateau.

I'm going to meet with Dr. SH before I return to Arkansas. He is much less aggressive than BB, and will probably tell me all the testing is massive overkill, the remaining treatment is overkill, we should watch and wait, etc. I'm not going to change my mind about BB's protocol whatsoever, but this might give me the psychological ammunition to refuse another fine needle aspiration of a tumor that everybody else thinks will go away and in any case we shouldn't look at it for 45 days, etc. etc. We'll see. It will be interesting to check in wtih SH after all I've been through so far.

I'm worried about some lingering tickling in my feet. If this is the onset of neuropathy, I'm gonna be bummed. It's gone on more or less unabated for a day but I think it could also just be swelling from the Dex, so I'm not going of the thalidomide just yet. I want to get the anti-cancer effects of that drug to keep working.

We should know a bit more, hopefully, on Tuesday when if I'm lucky we'll get the data from today's blood-draw back. Even this past Tuesday will only have reflected one day of the Thalidomide / Dex I was on, so hopefully that worked to suppress the cancer a bit more. Meanwhile, everything is on a positive trend -- I just want to see that M-spike completely gone.

Still, 0.27 g/DL is a lot better than 6.2 which is where I was before treatment back in February!!!

More news as it becomes available. Have a good weekend, folks!