Bart Price Bart's CLL/DLBCL Journey

Many of you have seen some previous emails describing how this new journey began so I will be very brief with the background.  Bart's chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL) was diagnosed about six years ago and remained indolent until about 15 months ago when he started on a new drug targeted for his disease, called Imbruvica.  He had a fantastic response and all was going well until mid-January 2018 when it was discovered he had high levels of calcium in his blood.  After a lot of testing it was determined that the calcium (which itself can become life-threatening) was elevated because his leukemia had transformed into a more aggressive lymphoma (diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, or DLBCL).  This challenging diagnosis called for treatment with a five drug combination chemo/immuno therapy regimen (called R-CHOP).   The schedule is 6 cycles of three weeks each.  His first cycle started on February 16.  He had some wildly high blood pressure readings during the 4.5 hr infusion of the rituximab, so they slowed down the infusion and treated the high BP.  All the other drugs went well.  We are anticipating loss his his remaining hair sometime soon!!