Making Progress

I was in clinic today instead of yesterday due to the MLK holiday yesterday.

The blood counts looks good. In fact the red blood counts look the strongest they have been in probably two years. White counts are good, too. But the Rituxan will suppress them somewhat.

The Tacro level in the blood was 4.5 this morning. The normal therapeutic level they shoot for is between 4 and 9. But we went below 4 a couple of weeks ago to encourage the graft cells to attack. Attack they did. So that's why we now have to battle the skin GvHD. But that's looking much better, so they reduced the Medrol dosage again today. They also bumped up the Tacro dosage just a little to try to push the Tacro level up to about 5.

I don't know if I'll get another massive dose of Rituxan this week or not. It sure does wear me out for about three days. I've slept on pillows smaller than these bags of Rituxan. I'll speak with Dr. Tam (Keating's boy, as he called himself when we first met) tomorrow to see if we do another round this week. Tam is a young oriental Australian. He is very sharp. Keating is Australian, too, hence the connection. They're both world class researchers/physicians and a pleasure to work with. I can't say the same about the transplant department - the dark side. Dr. Hosing is pretty good, though.

I'm happy that the Tacro level was at 4.5. I thought we would probably overshoot and have to come back down, spending a couple of weeks tweaking that. But it looks like we are about there. So that puts me ahead a little in getting back to a point where we can just monitor the CLL/Lymphoma.