June 1, 2001
Hi All,
We had an uneventful (as expected) visit to Dana Farber on Friday. All of Dave's counts are normal. Next visit his doctor will do a biopsy, and that will tell us how well Gleevec is working. Right now, we only know that it's lowered his whites, so it must be working!
The doctor is planning to have Dave take Gleevec for 18 months, or 12 months following a clean biopsy (so if the 3-month comes back clean, he'll only have to take it another 12 months). Since this is uncharted territory, there are no results to go by yet. The doctor will be presenting findings (at a conference, I think) at the end of August, and expects to have biopsied 3 or 4 more post-transplant Gleevec patients before then, so he'll have some data to work with.
Dave is feeling pretty good. He gets fatigued if he pushes himself too much, but then, so do I!! Otherwise, all is well. We go back to Dana Farber on June 25th, then we don't have to go for 3 months. Yay!
Allison