November 16, 2011 - And then the steroids wore off...

Margaret had been doing pretty well but she was on some serious amounts of steroids (180 mg of prednisone) and that made her feel much better.  Now that the steroids have worn off she is not feeling real great.  The good news is that her latest blood work is still showing more improvement in her liver enzymes!  Her AST went from 29 to 23 (normal is 8 – 43 so it is normal), her ALKPhos went from 162 to 109 (41- 108 is normal, almost there!) and her LDH went from 376 to 246 (122-222 is normal, getting closer).  The first two are signs of how well her liver is working and the third (LDH) is a marker for the lymphoma.  They will do a repeat of her PET scan after 2 or 3 cycles of chemo. 

Her blood counts are also lower, her white blood cell count is lower and WBC and her neutrophils are also lower. What the heck are neutrophils you ask, someone was not paying attention in biology class.  Honestly, apparently I wasn’t either but they are talked about a lot here especially with stem cell transplants.  Neutrophils are a specific type of white blood cell that helps protect against and fight infection.  There, are you happy you asked?  These drops in the blood count are expected and a good sign since they are caused by the chemo. 

Except for the being tired and feeling like crap (and yes, apparently crap is a medical term since the docs all know what it means) she is doing ok.  I specifically asked if they had any idea when the pain, cramps and intestinal issues would go away and the answer was no, so we got that going for us, which is not nice (slight misquote intentional).

There does seem to be a lot of amyloidosis patients here which is unusual.  Most are here for stem cell transplants (bone marrow).  Our experience has been that there may be one other person here with amyloidosis but now there are five or six.  One couple is here from LA and they think it is really cold.  The couple from Israel also thinks it is very cold.….. silly people, it is in the 30’s it will get a lot colder than this. 

At some point they will let us come home and just return for the chemo treatments which should be  just a few days every three weeks.  This sounds like a lot of return trips but at least we will be home most of the time.

Thanks for stopping by and reading my prose.