Maintenance Cycle 6 complete, femur pics
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:

Pic from last year:

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.

