So today was my husband's six month post-bone marrow transplant results from the bone marrow biopsy they did a week ago, Friday. That's a sentence and a half. Going in he was of course understandably nervous, as he usually is with doctor's appointments these days. Today we were both rather nervous as this set of results sort of paints the picture if you will of how the rest of your recovery will go.
So to really set the scene, we were a couple of minutes late because he spent the morning in immense pain from some sort of nerve issue going from the back of his hip down his leg. This issue actually called for a trip to the ER on Saturday which was just to waste four hours of our lives, be informed that he didn't have a fractured hip (which we had never suspected in the first place) and being sent home no wiser than we were upon arrival. So it carried on and this morning he was in a lot of pain.
We get to the office and they have you arrive an hour early to do general labs before an appointment, Tom overhears someone get told the lab is running about forty minutes behind... great. As if the anticipation isn't working up enough anxiety as it is... his appointment was already for 11:30 which meant a large chance of them "going to lunch" and us having an extra hour of sitting there. Luckily for us that scenario didn't happen. We got called back probably forty minutes behind schedule, but better than an hour and forty minutes behind.
Dennis (the assistant of some sort) starts by taking Tom's vitals. In between his random comments the only thing making a sound in the room is the rumbling of the air vents and Tom tapping his foot rather quickly to ease the anxiety.
The doctor comes in and starts with some small talk, asking about the weekend and then going on to discuss Tom's back. I can't speak for Tom, but I know my inner dialogue was screaming, "Just tell us the news already!!!! We can talk about the reptile show afterward!" So after his small talk there was a rather awkward pause. The doctor sits in his short wheely-stool and looks at his notes. He starts off by telling us that Tom's biopsy showed a 99.08% donor cell read (down from what was I believe 99.97% or so), but said that for this time frame post-transplant that 99.08% is also good.
Then came the big news... the biopsy yielded some leukemia cells. Tom's head just dropped in sync with my heart. He said it was less than 1% and that they were early developing cells only caught by a certain protein they had on them. Ordinarily (if it hadn't been for said proteins) they would have been dismissed as normal "young" cells. So I suppose there's a slight bright side. He feels confident that with it being so early and so few that it's treatable.
The treatment plan might be a bit sketch, but I suppose what are you gonna do? The plan is to have Tom stop his graft vs. host medicine and purposefully induce graft vs. host disease. The idea being to have the immune system pipe up and fight these abnormal cells. He feels confident that this will do the trick. It will just take close monitoring of Tom in the meantime to make sure that it doesn't get out of hand and shut down any organs, etc.
In about a month they'll do another biopsy to see where he stands. If it hasn't done the trick it may be necessary to follow up with some chemo and possibly to top up with some extra donor cells. Let us hope it all works in such a clean and straight forward way as the doctor has laid out.
It's hard to not try to force some sort of rationalization onto all of this, but it's the hand we've been dealt and we'll keep playing forward.
