The last two weeks had been pretty routine. I continued to get the Velcade shots each Friday. On Friday the fourth, my platelet counts were low enough that I had to get two units of them transfused the next day, but that was no big deal. That's happened before.
I broke one of my crowns and had to go twice to my dentist (awesome dentist by the way). We celebrated New Year's and my sixty-seventh birthday. A special thanks to all those who sent written remembrances of me; my daughters presented them all to me on the night of January second. I was so touched; I believe it was my best birthday ever.
But last Wednesday a nurse from Utah Cancer Specialists called with the lab results from the prior Friday. There are two key measures, or markers, for the myeloma, and they had last been measured on Friday, December 14. One, M-spike, had stayed level at 0.3, but the other, IgA, went up nearly 1,000 points from 3,258 to 4,220, a 30% increase in three weeks! Laraine and I and my family were devastated! We had expected the opposite since starting the Velcade shots, because Velcade worked so well for me when I was first diagnosed and treated with it. I only had to stop using it because of the neuropathy it caused in my feet.
Aside from being really sad about the news, I was a little bit panicked because I had thought I had more time to "put my house in order". Also, when I did various things, I said to myself, "This is probably the last time I will do this." It was depressing. I tried to make the best of the situation, but there was a cloud of gloom hanging over us. Nevertheless, Laraine and I prayed hard there could somehow be a different result.
Last Friday, when we went into the clinic for my weekly Velcade shot, the first thing I did was ask for a printout of the last week's test results, since the cancer markers had been given to me over the phone, and I had wanted to make sure the nurse hadn't made a mistake. Well, she hadn't and she had.
The printout always contains a column for each of the last ten tests, with the date for each test printed at the top of the column. On this printout, the last column had a date of January 8, a day on which I had not come into the clinic for a test. It also contained results for two tests that I never take. Finally, all the numbers in this column were so far out, that they couldn't possibly be mine. This column was bogus! But it was the one that had the IgA count of 4,220 and which the nurse had read to me.
More important, the column just before the bogus one carried the date of January 4, which was the correct date of my last test. Thankfully, the IgA count in this column was 1,669, down 1,551 points from the last test, a 52% decrease! This is exactly what we should have expected from the Velcade. You can imagine how happy we were! It was such a pleasure to communicate this discovery to all of our children and other loved ones.
We don't know why the bad data got onto my report; Dr. Nibley is checking it out. But it was probably someone else's information, manually entered into the system under my name, by mistake.
We had some other good news too! Laraine went to see Dr. Futrell, to get the results of the three-week heart monitor that she wore, and to undergo another ultrasound of her heart, this time administered via a tube down her throat, to get a picture from the inside. The result of all this is that Laraine will not need any corrective surgery, either to close the hole in her heart, which turned out to be very small, or to her carotid arteries. All she needs to do is take a statin drug, although so far the one she is taking makes her sick. We'll have to revisit that.
As of right now we and some of our kids are enjoying sunny Newport Beach, California for a week. It was quite chilly at first but is warming up nicely.
