The Valley

Today I woke up feeling pretty good. No nausea, not much leg pain, a tiny headache that coffee is still allowed to cure. Apart from the fact that I had woken up an hour earlier than I thought--because my phone was dead and the next device I consulted was still on eastern time--things seemed pretty manageable. I had coffee, cereal, listened to NPR, almost a normal morning.

At the clinic they drew my blood and did my vitals as usual, and we chatted with the nurse about how good I was feeling. After a while, I saw that the lab numbers were starting to come in on the Mayo phone app (the automated values are visible to patients in real time). Shortly after, the PA came in for our morning consult. First he noted that the MRI results from yesterday showed some narrowing of the small hole that one of my leg nerves passes through--but it was on the left side, not the right. Then he pointed out that my white cell count was down to 0.3 (billion) per liter, so we were nearing the nadir (that's the official term), which is fixed at 0.1 (billion) per liter, apparently because that's the lower limit of reliable detection (seems a little high to me, but I believed in Theranos, so what do I know). Anyway it was 1.7 (B/l) yesterday, so it did drop like a stone. I still felt good, but it took the wind out of my sails a bit.

In fact, this is what we want, for the existing blood cell lineages (pre-transplant) to crash. The resurrection takes place after that. But this will be the critical period for avoiding infection (yes I do hate the mask, but most of the rest is pretty easy to work with). Also maximum fatigue (red cell loss) and bleeding risk (platelets).

The good news is that I really do still feel pretty good, numbers notwithstanding. I hope this foretells rapid engraftment (that's the process by which the transplanted stem cells take up residence in the marrow and start pumping out the various blood cell lineages).

I don't always look my best, though.

I am smiling, really.