Thursday, January 22, 1009

Well, we got the long-awaited results from St. Louis, and, unfortunately, its not very good news.

The biopsy confirms what Dr. Vij has long suspected -- Greg does have Myelodisplastic Syndrome (if you're new here it means his bone marrow is so damaged it doesn't produce enough red cells, white cells or platelets). Its sometimes called "Pre-Leukemia."

In addition, his Multiple Myeloma is now officially out of remission. He had 32 percent cancer cells in this last biopsy. Back in September he was at 18 percent. Twenty percent is the cutoff for "partial remission." So, the cancer is back, too.

And, to top all that off, neither Tom nor Skibby was a match to be a donor for an allogeneic stem cell transplant. So, now they're searching for an unrelated donor match, and IF they find one (huge "if"), the transplant itself will be very risky. If you're interesting in becoming a donor, here's the web site: http://www.marrow.org/HELP/Join_the_Donor_Registry/index.html I signed up last year, but haven't been called by anyone to do it. There's a fee involved, and also an age limit (I think 55 or 60). And, I don't want to raise a lot of false hope for people, either. He probably needs some guy named Stanislaus over in Brataslava to sign up in order to find a match.

Greg had his labs drawn locally yesterday (he goes once a week now), and those numbers, while low, were stable, and for the second week in a row he didn't require a transfusion. So, a little good news.

Now its time to pray they find a match. Dr. Vij still says he's in no hurry to do a transplant. We're just watching and waiting.

This sucks.