Round 2 Complete with Cherry on Top

 Hey everyone,

Ruth asked me to blog because she's feeling quite fatigued, with a bit of headache tonight.  We think it's because her cell counts are probably at bottom following Round 2 of Chemo.  She's also on her continuous home immunotherapy, which can cause headaches too.

Round 2 ended up being an eight day hospitalization, longer than she was expecting.  It started off with a bone marrow biopsy and 2 failed attempts at lumbar puncture to instill chemotherapy into her cerebrospinal fluid.  So she ended up getting poked again the next day under xray to have the latter done.  Not a fun start.  The rest went fairly well with a the exception of developing very low sodium levels that almost bought her ICU stay, but quickly corrected with treatment by the nephrology team.  Her counts by discharge did not drop as much as during round 1, only needing 1 bag of blood this time.  

So what's the "Cherry on Top"?  Her bone marrow biopsy showed that following cycle 1, her leukemia is in remission!  Technically, these days doctors call it MRD - Minimal Residual Disease, where there's less than 1 in 10,000 leukemia cells detected.  A test called Clono-Seq was sent to see if there's less than 1 in a million, but has not come back yet.

This is good news.  A big answer to our / your prayers.  What does that mean?  It means thus far the cancer is not the scary, resistant cancer it could have been.   It means if she stays in remission, which she should for a while, she would go straight to Stem Cell Transplant.  She would skip the need for CAR-T therapy.  This also pushes up the time frame for Stem Cell Transplant and finding a match.  She'll still need a Stem cell transplant to give her the best shot at survival. Without it, the leukemia will invariably come back.  

Her hematology team is telling her transplant will occur hopefully in a month or two.  She'll finish off 28 days of immunotherapy, then it's just waiting on logistics of finding a match and preparing for transplant.  I'll blog separately about Stem cell transplant, because it requires a page of it's own.  

Thank you all for your support through this.  We realized we made the right decision to stay local this time.   It's made things so much easier emotionally for all 3 of us.  And Ruth gets to come home to her own bed, and sleep, sleep, sleep - something the hospital deprives you of.

Time to go to sleep...