And So We Wait - January 14, 2008

It’s been twelve days since our last update. Twelve days of waiting and wondering about the outcome of the bone marrow biopsy performed on January 2nd. Well, the call finally came this afternoon. The biopsy results were negative (that’s good). There was no sign of the leukemia, and that reaffirmed the fact that Jan remains in remission. As a result, Jan was ordered back to the hospital to begin the week-long consolidation chemotherapy. You may recall that Jan was admitted on January 2nd to begin the consolidation portion of her treatment, only to be discharged four hours later because her platelet count was too low. It needed to be 100,000 but was 4,000 short. As a result, she was ordered to have the bone marrow biopsy to rule out the possibility that the cause of the low platelet count was due to a return of the leukemia. This time Jan’s doctor reduced the minimum acceptable platelet count to 90,000. So, once again, lab tests were ordered soon after admission. This time, Jan’s platelet count was 49,000……nearly half the desired minimum acceptable level!!!! As a result, the chemotherapy which was scheduled to begin at 8:00 P.M. has been delayed until tomorrow morning when the attending physician can review the lab results and make a determination. This is becoming a real dilemma. All of Jan’s other lab numbers were perfect, and as mentioned earlier, her biopsy confirmed that any abnormal counts should not be attributable to the leukemia. So now we wait…..again; this time for a morning decision on how to proceed.