It’s been quite a while since I gave an update on my health.

The last two and a half months have been filled with great days and days of complete misery. There are days that I feel like I can’t keep on doing this, but when I start feeling better, the urge to live kicks in powerfully.

Here’re some of the side effects I experience from my treatment:

• The chemo wipes out all my white blood cells and then the injection stimulates the bone marrow to make new ones, but at a fast and too intense rate. This makes my bones hurt like hell and makes me extremely tired but without the ability to fall asleep, so I cannot get respite.
• My mouth and tongue sores can’t heal because I have no immune system.
• To help with intense pain, I have to take Morphine and Dilaudid which make me feel drunk, confused, agitated…etc. It also constipates which in turn causes bloating and abdominal cramps.
• My left forearm, toes, fingers, bottom lip, and jaw are full of neuropathy.
• My low red blood cell count makes me have almost no energy and impairs proper breathing.
• It also causes me to be very cold, especially at night.

Here’s a brief summary:

Right now, I continue to receive chemotherapy about every 3 weeks and receive an injection afterwards to stimulate my bone marrow to produce white blood cells and neutrophils which are extremely important in protecting me from disease.

Neutrophils are the foundation of a healthy immune system.

My neutrophils right now are almost nonexistent, so I essentially do not have a functioning immune system. This radically interferes with my recovery from Chemotherapy. The chemo wipes out my white blood cells, neutrophils, platelets and hemoglobin which I need for oxygen.

When my platelet count gets too low, I am at risk of not being able to stop bleeding.

When my red cell count and especially hemoglobin get too low, I have less oxygen in my system.

For the last two months, I have received platelets every other day at the clinic and lately red blood infusions as well.

My next round of chemo was supposed to start on Friday, but with my immune system being so low we are going to re-evaluate next Friday. We’ll probably push ahead and see what happens.

Right now, my LDH count is still going down, so this is a positive in this web of negatives.

I get an LDH test every time I go into the clinic.

Two weeks ago, my LDH was over 21,000 units per liter of blood.

Today my LDH count was all the way down to 1,698 U/L!

Normal levels of LDH in the blood can vary depending on the lab, but usually range between 140 to 280 U/L for adults.

 In case you are unfamiliar with LDH:

The lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) test looks for signs of damage to the body’s tissues.

LDH is an enzyme found in almost every cell of your body, including your blood, muscles, brain, kidneys, and pancreas. LDH enzyme turns sugar into energy. The LDH test measures the amount of LDH in your blood or other body fluid. When cells are damaged or destroyed, this enzyme is released into the fluid portion of blood, “plasma.”

 To end this post, I met with my social worker and Nurse Practitioner to talk through what happens next if I can’t continue with Chemotherapy.

Basically, they say that based on my past history, the cancer will rapidly spread throughout my body and I will get weaker by the day. They do not foresee any organ failure since I will continue to be able to get infusions and other treatment until I would enter hospice care. But the dead cancer cells can overwhelm my body and I would simply get weaker and eventually be too weak to keep on functioning.

This process can take a few weeks to maybe a month or more. The reality is that no one really knows how my body will respond.

I could go into remission somehow, or I could simply keep on responding positively to chemo treatments. In the meantime, I will try to stay safe from Covid-19 and try to keep on doing chemo treatments.