Avi entered Princeton Hospital for the first of the 3 scheduled EPOCH chemos on Wednesday, August 15. EPOCH is an aggressive chemo regimen, designed to quickly reduce the fast growing cancer in the bone marrow, so that as few cells as possible remain before the stem-cell transplant. Princeton Hospital is very new, with large well appointed private rooms and an incredible staff. The chemo drip itself started only the next day and was rather uneventful. Our oldest son arrived from Israel Thursday morning so he got to see the whole cycle. The drip is give over the course of 5 days - a new large bag of bright orange poisonous looking liquid was attached to Avi's port every day around 4pm, and he was allowed a very quick shower between the bags. Avi came in with a backache which he had for a couple of months, and the hospital bed made it quite worse, but despite that we managed to walk miles around the corridors - luckily the corridors are very long and wide, but it does get quite bo...
Now it has really been a long time – over a year since my last post. Over this year, many followers of this blog correctly interpreted this silence as a sign that my health continued to improve, and that I have nothing essential to report. Basically, this is the right interpretation, which is really great news! I got my life back, I have been cancer-free since my transplant, I hardly need any treatments and don’t suffer from anything comparable to my life in the years before my transplant. Indeed, in many ways I am almost back to the way I was four years ago when my lymphoma was discovered. So, what is this post about? Two main objectives of this blog, beyond updating people about my health in an efficient way, were (1) to remind myself in the future of what I went through, and (2) allow readers who were faced or will be faced with similar health problems to possibly learn from my story. Indeed, despite the first paragraph, there is plenty to tell about the past year since my las...
As I am going now into a more elaborate and very long treatment (see below), and it may harder to answer individual e-mail queries about my health, we decided to put updates on the development of my illness in this blog form, which mostly Edna will write. Still, feel free to send us e-mails – it just may just be that we will take longer to respond. Let me start with a short summary of my illness in the past 2+ years since discovery, to put everyone on the same page. I was diagnosed with Marginal Zone Lymphoma (MZL) in July 2017, following severe anemia. MZL is an indolent, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which sometimes is not even treated, when confined, as in my case, to the bone marrow. However, this cancer and other processes in my bone marrow had a major side effect of arresting my blood generation (first red blood cells, and later all bloodlines). During these two years I had four different treatments (one biological, one immune therapy, and two different chemo therapies), ...
Great news!
ReplyDelete