I feel no love.

Apparently Dr. Dugan (my oncologist) doesn't like me anymore. I had my appointment this morning and he said, I'll see you in 3 months. 3 months! How can that be - I need, at the very least, a monthly dose of the good doc. Someone to tell me that I'm great, never looked better. To make matter's worse, he told me he's going to cut my blood visits to monthly (from every other week). Monthly! I crave the data. I need to know that my Lymphocytes are still making up 39% of of my white blood cells.

I told him that its my money and if I want to pay him $100 to talk about how sick I am for 15 minutes, that's my prerogative. It's a sad day, I guess I'm getting healthier which means no more sympathy.

I do go back in about 10 weeks for my first molecular test. I hope to get some mileage out of that, though it's done through a peripheral blood draw so nothing exciting about that. It takes a good 10 days to get results on it so I'll get it done a couple weeks before my next appointment in July. July!

I did get blood work yesterday just to make sure he had what he needed before my appointment today. Here's the data:

Whities - 3,300
ANC - 1,800
Platelets - 124,000
Hematocrit - 40.2 (for those keeping track, normal levels for a man)
Hemaglobin - 13.8 (right on the lower edge of normal)
Red Blood Count - 4.47 (just shy of normal)

In short, blood looks good and my numbers may not stray much from this as long as the Gleevec continues to work. After the molecular test which is called an RT-PCR (you can read about it here), we'll get a baseline of how the progression of the disease has been going. The goal is to get the resulting number to go down on each subsequent test (the test will probably occur every 3 - 6 months).

Aside from all this medical stuff...my impala will be delivered this Friday if the weather stays dry. I am totally amped and hope to be out driving next weekend assuming we can get insurance, plates, title all squared away.



Holla!