Thursday, August 18, 2011

Still alive!

I'll keep this short...

PCR results showed a drop of nearly 28% from my December 2010!

This puts me at 0.818...

We finally broke the 1% barrier. Still a long way to go, but with our eye on the prize I'm hopeful we can get a MMR (Major Molecular Response).

Monday, December 6, 2010

Hello - anybody out there?

I know it's been a year...so the answer to the question is - yes, I'm still alive.

and well. actually.

My recent blood tests were promising and showing little signs of disease progression and I am...

1. in hematologic remission
This means that my CBC results (complete blood count) stabilized in a generally normal range.

2. in cytogenic remission
This means the results of my FISH test (Fluorescent in situ hybridization) shows that better than 90% of the 500 test cells are normal.

3. achieved ‘MMR’ or Major Molecular Response.
This means that the number of cells in my PCR-ABL (polymerase chain reaction test for the ABL gene) has consistently dropped. Two years ago this number was around 2.5% of my blood had the PH+ (Philadelphia 9-22 translocation gene) - at the last test this dropped to 1.4%. People that truly be the disease are in the 0.001 percent rage, but I’ll take downward trending at this point.

Lucky. plain and simple.

Tuesday, November 10, 2009

I know its been a long time...

and I don't intend to keep this thing particularly updated unless there is some sort of event or notable news.

and here's some news:

Click HERE.

For those of you who don't want to make the jump, its an article about Kareem Abdul Jabbar being diagnosed with CML. Wooo Hoooo, me and Kareem, blood buddies.

Monday, August 17, 2009

Updates.

So I'm pretty happy.

I had my six month appointment on Monday, August 10 with Dr. Cripe and here are the results:

WBC - 3.7 (low, but not horrible).
Hgb - 13.9 (again, low, but not horrible).
Hct - 39.6 (yep, low, but not horrible)
Platelets - 157,000 (yeehaw, this one actually falls in the normal skew).

Anyway, the numbers above are not really troublesome, but they don't really tell much of a story. At this appointment they also took blood for my PCR-ABL test that quantifies the number of PH+ cells in my body. I can't really explain the scale of which its measured, but I went from a 4.01 in Feb 09 to a 2.04 in Aug 09. In short, the percentage of PH+ RNA molcules was cut in half. Really good numbers are in the 0.00x range, but at least its going down.

Onward and upward.

Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Me Likely Keithy

Not much health stuff going on right now. I have an appointment to see Dr. Cripe next week which will be my 6 month check-up. This appoint is usually pretty short but does include a CBC and my PCR_ABL test. Keep your fingers crossed - the last one didn't go so well :(.

On a related note - Keith Olbermann had a pretty good commentary that I'd like to share with all of you. Its largely political affiliation agnostic (though with a slight Democratic bend).

Sunday, June 28, 2009

Needless to say - things have slowed down a bit.

Eli and I are working on doing some stop-motion movies with Playmobil, here is our first stab. The Music is courtesy Howard Shore from 'Lord of the Rings:Return of the King'.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

yeah.

sorry. been a month. I know.

Guess that means things are going well. April is a busy time around here, my birthday, Maris' birthday, Kris and my anniversary (7 years, thank you very much), Kris' birthday in early May and Mother's Day.

This year I got Kris a kayak for the anniv/birth/mothersday extravaganza. Its pretty cool really - 15' long and inflatable. It's essentially the same material as a white-water raft and designed for two adults (or single if need be). Attached is a photo where we went for a literal dry run. It took about 20 minutes to inflate, but I'm confident we can get that down to 10 now that we know what we're doing.