Health status update

A number of you have asked recently how my husband is doing and I thought now would be a good time to fill you in on all the action.

For those of you who don't know, my husband was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma last fall. You can read all the gory details here from the bottom up. Basically, the gist of the disease is that it is a cancer of the same family as Leukemia and even with treatment, the median survival length is about three years. We're hoping to defy that statistic.

Unfortunately, the efficacy of his current chemo therapy is at the end of its reach and his cancer marker numbers are not consistently dropping. This is fairly characteristic of these types of blood cancers. So, he's been taken off of the chemo. We thought he would be eligible for a couple clinical trials but he hasn't "officially" failed the therapy so he isn't.

The next step is something called an autologous stem cell transplant. What this means is that they harvest his own stem cells from his blood by hooking him up to something that you can imagine is similar to a dialysis machine. He then will get a high dose of a drug called Melphalan to basically kill off his entire immune system. After a few days he'll receive back the harvested cells.

The idea is that the cells he gets back are "cleaner" than what he started with. The stem cells in the blood are generally less affected than what's in the bone marrow. Plus, the cancer cells tend to not survive the processing as well. Of course, the risk of the cancer returning is still rather high. The stastics of recurrence aren't fabulous, but it does buy some time.

Hopefully in the meantime, they'll make some headway on antibody treatments. And, we'll just keep plugging along.

Never a dull moment around these here parts.