I spent all morning up at City of Hope for a follow-up appointment with my transplant doctor. My counts all look good. My white blood count is 5500 and my ANC count is at 2800. Both are right in the middle of the normal range, which means my immune system is rebounding as expected. That’s very encouraging.
On the actual cancer front, the lab results are frustratingly hazy. The key thing my doctor wants to see is a big drop in my M protein level. Today I got the results from two weeks ago (it takes a while for the lab to do this particular test), and my M protein level had dropped from 1.0 to 0.38. The good news is that this means I responded to the chemotherapy. The hazier news is that it hasn’t dropped to zero, as we’d like it to. I won’t have the results of today’s test until next week, but hopefully it will show a drop that gets me close to zero. Following that, around the end of June, I’ll have a biopsy that will provide firm results on how well I responded to the chemo.
So….we wait. I’m not super thrilled with the 0.38 number, but my doctor assures me that this might represent nothing more than old cells lying around that haven’t quite died off yet. We’ll see.
