[Darice]

Good point, mausmich.

pinebluff:

One of the things you need to look at is your father's IPSS score. This is a scoring system developed to indicate disease severity. Your doctor should have indicated what he determined the IPSS to be, but there are tables to determine it yourself. It takes into account three factors: number of blasts (immature cells), chromosomal damage, and cytopenias (indicating red, white, and/or platelet involvement). As I see it, your father gets a 0 in category 1 for less than 5% blasts, a 0 in category 2 for no chromosomal damage, and a 0.5 in category 3 for trilineage or pancytopenia. That gives him a score of 0.5 which puts him in the low risk category.

That's not the whole story, of course. His age and any other health problems he may have can increase his risk factor and complicate his treatment. But there are still lots of treatment options. I don't think that the Vidaza was given a fair shot, but I think he probably was helped by it. There are other drug and chemo therapies. He would not be a candidate for a stem cell transplant, but transfusions and growth factors would bring his counts up which would have him feeling better . . . and help to fight the darned staph infection.

One interesting thing to me about the report is that they do just kind of tiptoe around actually diagnosing MDS. They say "pancytopenia with myelodysplastic features" and refer to a "myelodysplastic process" . . . that also indicates to me that your father's position isn't quite as dire as your doctor seems to indicate.

I just think it's criminal that the doctor hasn't given him Neupogen or Neulasta to help fight the infection. And it could, as in my husband's case, help boost his other blood counts.