Day 117 - tired marrow

Got my labs today: hgb 10.3, plts 59, ANC 600. I think this means my poor marrow is still feeling somewhat battered. I am not sure what else I can do to help pamper it. I am taking vitamins, sleeping 10 hours a night, napping and doing sudoku. Really, what more could my marrow want? I am glad it gets a ten day break until the next chemo. I think we both need it.

In other exciting news, Dr. Hill says I can eat regular food now if I'm careful. Sadly, Terry was sick today so we could not go out to dinner tonight. Maybe tomorrow.

I did some weaving today of a sampler for Ellie's blanket. It was nice to be weaving. I couldn't find the particular shuttles I wanted so I made myself some of out cardboard. When the visiting nurse arrived, I was using a box cutter on a cardboard box. I was being very careful, but all the same, I'm glad she didn't notice. I actually knew her from her time as a nurse at Exeter Hospital back when I used to work there too so that was nice. I only have one more dose of ceftriaxone and then I'll be free and no longer required to be housebound which will also be freeing.

I read an NEJM and a JAMA today. I have been really interested to see how much emphasis has been put recently on the quality of medical/scientific data. There were two articles and an editorial about the problem of missing data in studies. There have been really interesting articles about publication bias and bias in terms of which research is actually done recently to name the ones I can for sure remember. Being able to understand statistics is becoming more and more important in just being a plain old doctor. Geez! I liked statistics in college (in fact it was my lone A+), but I wonder about people who don't.

There was also this really interesting article in this week's JAMA about proneurotensin (secreted stoichiometrically to neurotensin, a 13 amino acid peptide that seems to regulate GI motility and satiety). It is also expressed in human malignant ductal breast tumors and seems to be linked to diabetes and CHD. These researchers in Sweden followed almost 30,000 people for five years and found that by quartile, higher proneurotensin increased the risk of cardiovascular disease (men and women), increased all-cause mortality (men and women) (but not that convincingly IMHO), increased cardiovascular mortality (men and doubled in women from lowest to highest quartile), and breast cancer in women (increase in HR was 2.44). I think we may be hearing more about this neurotensin stuff, although to be fair I also thought we'd be hearing more about ghrelin (what?).

Well, that's all the news for me for today. I hope for continued healing of my good marrow and continued dying of my leukemia for myself. For you, perhaps separation of the wheat from the chaff, too?