CR

I made a quick trip to Mayo just before Memorial Day, a routine follow-up with blood and urine samples and a C/T scan to make sure my bones were still holding together. The original plan was to drive up to Rochester, with the dog in tow, and continue from there out West as far as Salt Lake City for a wedding and some long-overdue visits with friends. After a quick overnight test trip of ~200 miles, though, we decided that we couldn't do the dog-and-drive thing for two weeks straight without driving ourselves crazy, so we decided we'd better board the dog and fly. We're going to practice traveling with Sunny, and hope to get her as far as Wisconsin, at least, this Summer.

The visit to Mayo was happily uneventful, and confirmed the fact that I am still essentially disease-free at this point. My hematologist (third author on this paper) noted that I now meet the criteria for "complete response," and we figured that I've been there for about a year now. The kappa and lambda numbers keep edging close to one another, and both are in the normal range. The other lab values look fine across the board (platelets a little low, but not alarmingly so). Even my hard-pressed red blood cells have rallied to boost my hemoglobin up into the normal range. My bones are holding together, too--nothing new going on there.

Lots of patients would have treatment stopped at this point, but it's not something we're contemplating now. The "high risk" 17p deletion argues against stopping, as does the fact that I'm tolerating all the drugs pretty well. The only change is that I'll start getting Zometa (that's what's keeping my bones together) every 6 months instead of every 3 months. It seems to be making my teeth a little bit brittle.

The wedding, visits, etc. were great. We're not in the habit of enumerating friends, so it was kind of a surprise to me just how effortlessly we filled up every available minute of the week with great friends, while still sadly failing to see many others. We'll have to come back again soon.