Day 3

well, today I realized that the part of the subtitle that says "how she got rid of it" is really only partially true. On the one hand, it is I that will be rid of this thing, but it is my team and I that will be doing the ridding. English is so beautifully nuanced.

so, yesterday was my last daunarubicin which is the red stuff that affects my bodily secretions' color (for the more delicate among you) and also makes me kind of nauseous. I am happy to have that behind me. It seems to be working at giving me side effects, hopefully it is having the same effect in my marrow.

so, have I described the overall game plan? Here it is. this chemo for 3.5 more days to wipe out everything in my bone marrow, then wait around for 7 days while my bone marrow finishes dying off, then recheck biopsy around July 1 to see if my marrow is all dead. Dr Hill says it's like having a garden and you have weeds and flowers and you douse the whole thing in weed killer and then the flowers come back but not the weeds. So, on day 14, my marrow ideally is "empty." if it is, we then commence waiting for the flowers to come back. when the flowers come back sufficiently, I get to go home and recover a bit. then a while later I return for three more rounds of chemo. The one potential wrinkle is that Dr. Hill is worried that I may have had a longer term process going on and if so the chemo will not cure me even if it looks like it has so he usually recommends that people go straight to bone marrow transplant at that point. I'm hopeful that I can avoid that, for sure.

Anyway, so now, what I am imagining is that the chemo is killing off all the bad players in my marrow and the flowers are stronger and hanging on better. My hemoglobin, platelets and good white cells are "hanging in there" in my labs so I think this is a good interpretation.

Yesterday I had three doctor friend visitors, Ira (who came initially for a social visit and then we decided to make it a professional visit), and Eva and John. Because of the debacle of the daunarubicin ("donna ruby sin") yesterday, my chemo got way behind schedule and Eva and John got to be here for it again.

I got to talk on the phone with Dan, my bestie from age 14, and Tim who has known me since before Emily was born so that was nice too. Someone from the palliative care department came and gave me a massage which was pretty fab too.

Physically I feel better today than yesterday so that's good. I don't seem to have any worse side effects than nausea and a dry mouth so it's all good (except having the leukemia in the first place).