I got back my final lab results today. We were mainly looking for two things. First, the volume of the antibody that corresponds to the particular type of blood plasma cell that had become cancerous. In my case, that’s the IgG antibody, and over the course of the chemotherapy its volume has fallen from 6200 to 1580. This puts it—barely!—within the normal range. Second, the level of a protein marker that tells us what percentage of my plasma cells are healthy vs. cancerous. This has gone down from 4.2 to 1.18. Ideally I think it would be closer to zero than that, but it’s still a pretty good number.
Bottom line: the first stage of my chemotherapy has been successful and is now over. Hooray! The side effects are going to linger for a while, but hopefully not for more than a month or so. At that point, I’ll be ready for stage 2, which is an autologous stem cell transplant—that is, a procedure in which they draw out stem cells from my blood and then transplant them back into my body later. You can google the gory details if you really want them.
That will all happen in about a month or so, and will probably put me out of commission for a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I get several weeks of recovery time along with a whole bunch of pre-op workups. Should be loads of fun.
But the important thing is that stage 1 is over and I’m basically in remission. I’m now crossing my fingers and hoping that stage 2 is equally successful.
