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Not much to report this month. My M-protein level—a proxy for the level of cancerous plasma cells in my bone marrow—is down from 0.48 in February to 0.43 in March. That’s not a big drop, but it’s a drop, and anything moving in the right direction is good news. Apparently the evil dex is reluctantly doing its job.

FWIW, there are other markers besides M-protein that I haven’t been sharing because they’re all basically OK and haven’t changed much. For example, we routinely measure something call Kappa light chains, and it’s been at a nice low level ever since the first round of chemotherapy. Ditto for my IgG immunoglobulin levels. (There are three types of immunoglobulins corresponding to three different types of multiple myeloma. I have the G version.) This is all good news. If we can just get the basic level of cancerous cells down close to zero, I’ll be in pretty good shape. In fact, it’s even possible that the slow response of the M-protein level is a positive thing, since it would be expected if I have a very slow-moving version of multiple myeloma. That’s just speculation at this point since there’s no way of knowing, but it fits the evidence so far.

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