Phil has completed three cycles of Melphalan, and his light chain numbers are slowly going down. Blood will be drawn again in early February, and we hope that downward trend will continue. Phil is discouraged, and is suffering from increasing side effects, especially from the Dex, which he has been on for 10 months. We will talk with Dr. Smith about it when we see him on February 3.
We are somewhat mystified over the latest news about Phil’s kidneys. It appears they are working at 21%; below 20% and a person needs dialysis. We are now engaged in an experiment to see if Phil can get off dialysis totally. He started last Friday doing just two manual exchanges a day, and no cycler at night. If his creatinine holds steady when checked in his monthly blood draw, he will be taken off dialysis completely for two weeks, and then his creatinine checked again.
We are not getting excited about this; we have been disappointed too many times since his diagnosis. Our big question is how an accurate measure of his kidney function can be obtained when urine testing is done partly on urine collected overnight when his dialysis is taking place. (We asked, but didn’t get much of an answer. I suspsect it’s complicated.) So we will see. We had hints of this back in April when his catheter migrated out of position and he was also doing minimal dilaysis. At this point, I’d be happy if he could simply do an exchange or two each day, or perhaps use the cycler a couple nights a week.
I’ve been struggling with depression again, perhaps because of reading that another blogger’s husband has only a little time to live. At least, it seemed to start shortly after reading that news. Perhaps it’s also because I’m also very tired, and have been in a lot of pain lately. At least the days are getting longer – when we left for church Sunday night, around 5:30, it was still light. 5-1/2 weeks until we turn the clocks ahead. I have to remember not to schedule anything that week, since it takes me a long time to recover from losing that hour.
On a lighter note, I have discovered a wonderfully funny TV show: Monk. Adrian Monk is an extremely OCD detective who always solves the crime, but drives everyone batty with his OCD ways. Hilarious. (I discovered that USA Network is airing reruns at 7:00 am Tuesday – Friday, and at 6:00 am on Saturdays, in addition to the new episodes on Friday evenings. Since I don’t get up that early, I’m taping – yes, a VCR – them for later viewing.)
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