Avi's Lymphoma

Happy holidays This is certainly happening here. Most of the family is visiting again for a week — here is some of what we did: https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipM4rpBa1m72cCTMbJUbQ1PGl4fjiyeu5cljj9acz8I2U3N-FOleVDctP-mWVC1ahg?key=SkRmNS10M1U1NWRTZ1J5VkxuWm92RXlZeWdBQnlR  One highlight for me was riding bicycles again after a very long time - we went for an hour around Central Park. Pics are better than many words... Happy New Year!

Things here continue to move along nicely. Here are a few more milestones from the past week.   Yesterday I got the last scheduled treatment at the hospital!     From now on, if all goes well, it will be only blood tests.   The results of these continue to be very good. For example, my hemoglobin level went above 10 for the first time since the beginning of this illness (there was a blip during one of the early treatments when this happened, and soon fell again, but mostly I was hovering between 7-8). I have no idea where above 10 this level will stabilize (normal for adult males is between 13 and 16), but being very anemic for so long I can feel and appreciate this increase in the ability of my blood to carry oxygen (e.g. my heart rate is going appropriately down, which affects any physical activity).   Another piece of good news came from the pathology report of my bone marrow biopsy 2 weeks ago. Recall I explained the notion of chimerism – basically what...

A quick post as there is nothing much to report. Avi is doing well and is getting stronger. He even started growing back some facial hair! The last ten days were very uneventful – we took some walks, saw many friends, had our first movie outing (on Tuesday afternoon, the theater was almost completely empty). We saw Knives Out which we both enjoyed a lot and highly recommend. And of course Avi had blood tests every 3-4 days, and the numbers are all steadily improving. He also got his weekly Rituxan infusions – will get the last one on Friday. Yuval and Vivian will arrive on Thursday morning and stay with us. Einat, Sahar, Tamar and Nuri will arrive Friday. They won't stay with us but we plan to hang out together as much as possible. Tamar will surely love the Christmas decorations and festivities —it will be a novel experience for her.

It is getting hard to find “news” as the past week has shown, and so the rate of our posts may go down. Be assured that this is a good sign! As some of you may know, transplant teams at hospitals like to name the transplant date as a “second birthday’’. My transplant was on November 5, so I am officially one month old! And I got a very nice gift for it. On Tuesday, on day +28, I had my first bone marrow biopsy after transplant. While most results will take a week or two to arrive, my doctor (who is at a conference in Florida) asked his nurse to call me with preliminary results that excited him: no lymphoma cells were found! It is the first time in 2.5 years that my marrow seems cancer-free!   This disappearance of cancer cells may be due to the EPOCH chemo I got just before transplant (a biopsy before the last round of EPOCH showed the cancerous cells decreased to 0.36% of all white cells, and perhaps the last round killed the rest).    Or perhaps the new immune ...