Thursday, 12th June

It's all just good news this week :)

Jimmy's appointment went very well with Prof Novitzsky last night.  Prof is very happy with the mobility improvement in Jimmy's back as well as a significant decrease in pain.  He says we have the chemo to thank for this and it is a good sign that those lovely cocktails are killing off the cancer.  He did not have any of the recent blood tests in the file so couldn't comment on the protein levels which is the best indicator of how Jimmy is doing.  Hopefully Sister Olivia will have these tomorrow and she will be able to tell us.  They did bloods last night and Jimmy's white blood cell count was up from 1.2 to 2.8 (3.5 to 10.0 is normal).  This means he is not out of the woods yet but at least he can go out again.  Prof has given the go-ahead to start the third cycle of chemo tomorrow.

Of course this is the yucky one on the drip, which takes longer and what we call the orange chemo is added.  It will be interesting to see if Jimmy has any side effects again because then we will definitely know it is the orange one causing the trouble.

We also discussed whether Prof had any idea yet whether Jimmy would have 4 or 6 cycles of chemo in total and he said it is too early to tell.  At the end of 4 cycles he will check protein levels and if he is happy with them then he does another bone marrow biopsy which will tell us if Jimmy is in remission.  If he is not happy with the proteins then they will do the extra 2 cycles as he can't do another 2 bone marrow biopsy's.  He also explained that Jimmy would probably need about a month to recover from the chemotherapy treatment before they do the stem cell transplant and he would use this recovery period to fill in all the forms and do the motivation for medical aid purposes.

The only problem Jimmy has at the moment is bowel movement.  It is over 10 days since he last went and we have been using a number of meds which have not helped.  Prof says his calcium levels are not too bad and this is now being caused by all the pain killers Jimmy is taking.  Today he had an enema.  I have to laugh at how pathetic men can be.  You would have sworn Jimmy was giving birth.  I actually said to him afterwards that this is nothing...imagine if he still had to look forward to giving birth after this and explained that this is what women have before they give natural birth.  You would have enjoyed being a fly on the wall, just to see the look on his face!

We decided to make hay while the sun shines today and went birthday shopping and had lunch at the Blue Route Mall and tomorrow is Friday and we have a full house to look forward to with all our chickens here for the weekend.

PS Have a look under 'pages' on the blog - I have added some more literature about Multiple Myeloma.