Thursday, May 8, 2003 11:50 AM CDT
Susan here -
We got Nathan's bone marrow test results and they are sort of inconclusive. On his right side, the bone marrow was completely replaced with cancerous cells when we started and is now at 60%. The doctor is unsure if this is active cancer or dead/inactive cancer cells that his marrow hasn't reabsorbed yet. On his left side there was no change and is still around 30-40% cancerous. They will not be doing is stem cell rescue next week since the marrow isn't clean. They will repeat the biopsy before his next round of chemo and see how it is. What else they may do depends on if he is hospitalized in the next few days. His counts are down and so now if he gets a fever he will go into the hospital. If this does happen he may have a urine collection which will be tested. He initially had this test done to provide a baseline and so they would compare results to see if that showed any improvement. They may also do a cat scan to see if the tumor has shrunken. If he doesn't go into the hospital this weekend we will reassess Monday as to what tests he will have when. I didn't get a feel for how likely it would be that this was just dead tumor in the marrow versus active cancer. So - we are disappointed but will have to wait and see - which is very hard to do.
Tomorrow he will have a platelet transfusion. This only takes a half hour or so.
He is more tired today with his counts down. He immediately took a nap after the clinic.
So that's the news....
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