Maintenance Cycle 6 complete, femur pics

Chris Ballard
Sep 1, 2018 · 3 min read

I just started cycle 7 this week..

Myeloma labs came back good. no m-spike, still in sCR remission.

I’m back on 2 doses every two weeks. The single dose every 2 weeks sounded like a good idea, but it was kicking my butt. I heard today from another patient who is a former college football player that the single dose was kicking his butt too, so I feel like much less of a wimp now. I did both of my treatments this week at 5pm, and I liked it. We’ll see how the crash happens, but if it isn’t too impactful to my work schedule, I may stick with this. The clinic is way less busy at 5pm and things just went quicker.

I spoke with my doctor about my 24 ppm bone marrow biopsy. I’m summarizing here, and probably missing some details but:

  • the FISH test didn’t show any of the bad mutations
  • all of the clones on my MRD test are the SAME clones from diagnosis. Looks like everything is pretty stable.
  • the stuff that’s showing up 24ppm is just not growing/dividing rapidly, so the meds I’m on don’t kill that stuff, and it’s not growing. While the doc didn’t have an immediate answer to this, here’s my theory: The clone that’s showing up at the highest concentration is NOT the one that I was diagnosed with. So that guy has prob been just chillin’ and not causing a lot of havoc. I am thinking about it this way — If that was the only cancerous clone that I ever had(it’s an IgG Kappa), it would take forever to kill me. :)
  • most importantly, about the stuff I read and wrote about about people on my protocol reaching MRD negativity.. well, for that study they were measuring MRD only to 10^-4 power.. MRD now measures down to 10^-6. At the current level of measurement, 24 ppm @ 10^-6 = 0 ppm at 10^-4.. That means I’m technically MRD negative by the criteria that my study is based on. I guess that’s good in a “glass half full” kind of way.

I had a femur X-Ray today, and things are still progressing slowly.

New Pic from today:

8/31/2018

Pic from last year:

10/5/2017

Looks like we’re still 3 years or so from a fully healed bone, but it’s looking good.

I have 0 issues with the prospect of snowboarding this winter. I just need to make it happen.

In other news, we’re getting a baby brother next week for our dog Tofu.. His name is Hoagie. I love him.

Chris Fighting Cancer

These are the chronicles of my experience battling Multiple Myeloma

Chris Ballard

Written by

Chris Fighting Cancer

These are the chronicles of my experience battling Multiple Myeloma

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