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August 13, 2006
Friends,
Another pretty quiet day today. I have started my middle day of Induction Chemotherapy. There are three types of chemo I might expect to receive. First is Induction Chemo. Designed to take me into remission. Normally this chemo is done once, but can be done again if necessary. The second chemo is Consolidation Chemo. It is a pretty agressive chemo, designed to help consolidate and extend the health gains realized by Induction Chemo. Consolidation can be used several times if a donor is being sought or something like that, to keep the patient in remission until the transplant procedures can be started. It is concievable that if I go into remission after induction, they might completely skip Consolidation and go right to the third type, Transplant Preparation. There are technical terms for this, but I will leave it at that. This type of chemo immediately preceeds a stem cell transplant, and gets the transplant recipient's body ready for the donated stem cells. This type of chemo may also be combined with whole body radiation.
As I said, I have started my middle day of Induction. I am starting to get more tired, more quickly, and my appetite is fading. Other than that, no serious side effects. I might loose my hair, or maybe not.
My computer trials are not over yet. It appears that ZCloud won't relay my mail, and for some reason I can't get into my webmail, so I have not received any emails in the last 24 hours. If you sent me something, I haven't gotten it yet. I might still get it, but more work needs to be done. The email address on this message should get to me fine, so if you want me to get an email, send it to tw@zcloud.net.
On the medical front - Nothing remarkable here. I am responding well to chemo so far. I feel fine otherwise. I might get another central line tomorrow, to replace the PICC line. A vascular surgeon will be evaluating me for that tomorrow morning. My white count was down to .2 today. I am bringing back the table of blood counts I used before, for your reading pleasure. In the coming days, my blood counts should drop to very low levels. PLT, RBC and HGB will kept at survivable levels artificially until they recover naturally along with the WBC levels. You can see some of these fluctuations already. I have gotten a couple of PLT and Red Cell transfusions accounting for the increases you see. My current WBC levels have dropped to about the lowest possible detection levels for the counters, so it will probable just stay there for a couple more weeks and then hopefully start to creep up with healthy white blood cells.
Lab Results |
Blood Cell Type |
Normal Low |
8/10 |
8/11 |
8/12 |
8/13 |
| WBC |
4.5 |
12.9 |
1.7 |
0.7 |
0.2 |
| RBC |
4.3 |
3.00 |
3.02 |
3.21 |
3.03 |
| HGB |
13.9 |
10.4 |
10.7
| 10.9 |
10.8 |
| PLT |
130 |
10 |
56 |
25 |
14 |
WBC is
White Blood Cell
RBC is Red Blood Cell
HGB is Hemoglobin
PLT is Platelets
Hope you all had a great weekend!
Ted
tw@wilcoxent.com
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