Marrowforums - Tough decision coming soon.

Dan, I just got back from my appointment. I was pretty apprehensive going into the appointment just because of the nature of this disease. My Dr. was feeling very well about the results of my BMB on last Monday and my blood counts are very good also. She said again (which I knew) how rare this combination of the Philadelphia chromosome (9;22) and AML. The Vidaza and Sprycel are doing exactly what they are suppose to do and considerably better than expected. My numbers "bottomed out" after first cycle. They were having me do blood tests twice a week and the numbers have been better almost every week. Platelets bottomed at 20 and are now at 272. Neutrophils are in the normal range and WBCs and RBCs are just barely below normal. My HGB is at 11.6 which is fine. From the biopsy, blasts are less than 5 percent with no circulating blasts and there is "No morphologic or immunophenotypic evidence of residual acute
myeloid leukemia". I will start my 3rd cycle of Vidaza on Monday.

The goal is that the donor cells can work in this environment to suppress any attempt by the disease to reappear. It will be another week before we get the results of the cytogenetic analysis. The Dr. said if she had a resident working for her she would have him/her write me up as a case study. There is almost no information available on my situation because of how rare it is. My good friends always said I wasn't "normal", now they have medical evidence.