Nice Work

Just yesterday I said that the meditation words of the day were "engraftment" and "remission." Did I not? Somebody must have been listening to me.

Here is the news I got this morning: I am 98% engrafted and they can find no signs of leukemia.

The test for engraftment was performed very early. They generally do this test at about a month out from transplant, and I am only at 19 days. They were concerned because they thought they had seen some leukemia "blasts" in a blood test. They have since decided that this was a false positive, because I have nothing in my biopsy or in any subsequent blood tests. In any event, this is very early, very good news. When the patient is not in remission (I was not) it's common for transplants to fail because the disease interferes with the engraftment process. Apparently the horrible byzantine back-shelf chemo they gave me did enough of a number on my disease that I find myself with these great results.

The idea is that the new cells, which build a new immune system, can kick the leukemia's ass, which my own system was unable to do. My donor is a guy and I have taken to calling these new cells "The Boy." So, ideally The Boy takes over and does serious damage to the disease if it tries to make a comeback. I have something called "refractory" leukemia, which means that it's sneaky and it hides and relapse is inevitable without radical measures like this one.

We still have many rivers to cross, but this is a major hurdle. Transplant is no joke so I have to expect that I may have various problems down the road, and we'll never stop worrying about relapse. I have decided to just go ahead and be goddamn happy, though, because why the hell not?

I'm feeling good and there's talk of springing me by the end of the week.

Thanks for all the love and support, as always. I'm so happy to have something really good to report.

xxoo L