March 2004
Happy Spring to you!
Our crocuses are blooming -- a wonderful surprise when we returned home from Boston on Monday afternoon! Dave had his 4-year check-up, and all looks good. His blood counts are fine, the reds are doing better, thanks to a couple of shots of Aranesp. (Have you seen the commercials for Procrit where the guy talks about undergoing chemo and he's really fatigued, so his doctor gives him Procrit? Aranesp is the same thing -- it stimulates the production of red blood cells so patients don't suffer from so much fatigue).
No biopsy this time. That didn't break Dave's heart! His doctor lowered Dave's dosage of Gleevec to 400mg. We'll go back in August and he'll see how things look. If all is okay, he'll leave him at 400 for another 4 months and check again. The doctor's only hesitation is that there is no data from any doctors who have taken their patients off Gleevec (as he says, no one has yet, including him), so he doesn't have any research to call on to make this decision. However, since Dave is doing so well, his test results have been coming back negative for so long, and he's willing to stop taking the drug, the doctor is willing to say 3 years is a reasonable length of time for a post-transplant patient to take Gleevec (he wouldn't be willing to say this for a non-transplanted patient, since they don't have donor cells to keep things in check).
Speaking of donor cells, for the past 2 years Dave's system has been 99% donor (Jon's) cells - that was the goal of the bone marrow transplant. Dave still doesn't like country music, so that must be the 1% left.
So that's the latest. Plenty of dull moments -- just the way we like it!
Allison