Hi! Hope everyone had a good hari raya/deepavali. I certainly did. went visiting on the first and second of raya...had too much rendang and ketupat, but it was all good. spent almost every other waking hour trying to finish Warcraft III (picked it up again soon after coming home from the hospital). Also went to the supermarket every now and then when I got really bored...found a really nice fishing hat there for only RM13!
Checked back into the hospital on the 17th morning for my bone marrow aspiration. the coward that i am, i asked to be sedated for the procedure. so i didn't remember what happened, and slept all day until 6.30 PM. woke up starving and hoping that my results would be better than the previous one.
Next day - BMA results day. Dad arrived at 8.30 AM to see the doctors. We waited semi-anxiously (me semi-sleeping), and the docs only came around to my room at 11 AM. Maybe they wanted to see me last. They said a lot of things, mostly medical jargon, and I didn't understand a whole lot of it. I didn't know what to make of it, are they good news, or bad news? The docs repeated what they explained in layman terms, what i got out of it was - i am in partial remission, but about 70%-80% of the blast cells are still in my bone marrow. My blood counts showed that some of the cells developed into mature cells, because my platelets have gone up into the normal range, and my haemoglobins and total white have gone up, although not much, over the past 12 days. I have what they call "refractory AML" (stubborn cancer cells, just die, will ya!?).
Anyway the HLA typing results came back, and they identified one of my brothers has a perfect Class I match with me, so he needs to come back to see if we have a Class II match. Basically there are 6 antigents they need to match for my brother to become a donor. We have a perfect match for the first three antigents (Class I), so we now must test for the next three (Class II).
So, as far as my current condition, the docs said something about re-strategizing the treatment. I don't fully understand yet what they intend to do, but i'll try to in due time. What I get is next week I will start on my 3rd chemo course, under the FLAG regime. I'm still trying to find out what it is, but I believe it will consist of a set of more potent chemo drugs, since the doc said that it will take me about 4 weeks to recover, and I should preferably be treated in a single room.
I guess I'm not having it as easy as I hoped. But I suppose I'll just have to be patient and keep on trying. I got to go home today, but have to be back in the hospital by Monday morning. That should be enough time for me to finish the rest of my Warcraft III chapters..heheheh.
