February 24th, 2018

On Thursday Karen and I had a busy morning.  We had to go to hospital to get a bone marrow sample extracted.  I lay on my stomach, they numb my hip bone and then they drill a hole to extract the samples they need.  It is not that bad but it is not fun either.  It leaves you sore for a couple days.

This sample is important in determining the rest of my treatment.  If things look good then I will continue with chemo and consolidation treatments.  If things looks bad, they will recommend that I get a bone marrow transplant.  I would really like to avoid the transplant option for several reasons I will not get into today.  We should have some bone marrow information back next week.

Right now I am scheduled to go back to the hospital this coming Wednesday to start the first round of consolidation chemo.  It is a weird schedule I have yet to grasp.  I go in Wednesday, spend the night, go home Thursday, come back Friday, spend the night, go home Saturday, come back Sunday and go home Sunday.  Then I am done for about 21 days at which time we do it all over again.  It has been explained to me that this process takes any cancer cells that my be forming or have formed and beat them down again until no more survive.  This is over simplified, but has been proven to work over the past 20 years.

For me right now I feel very good.  I am eating like a horse, all my numbers are way up and I have lots of energy.  Karen and I are going on pretty long walks and venturing out into public a little bit.  We walk to get coffee or go to the store to replace all the food I am eating.  I am still very cautious going out in public because I still only have about 1/10th of my normal immune system.  I wear a mask, keep my hands in my pockets when possible and wash my hands a lot.  It feels nice to do normal stuff everyone takes for granted.

I am worried about what this next round of chemo is going to do to me, I feel so good right now I don't want to get knocked down again.  It has to be done as it is part of the treatment, I can only hope that these smaller rounds of chemo will not knock me down as hard as the first round.  I will prevail either way.