Dr. Thomas

It was a very, very long appointment. First we had to wait for over 2 hours to see the doctor. And technically we saw the nurse practioner - Tiffany. She delivered some great news -- Mom's creatinine is 1.7 which is lower than it has ever been in this whole process (normal is .8 to 1.5)and her blood urea nitrogen is 26 which is down from 45 (normal is 8 to 20). They shared a new one that we had never seen before ... Bence Jones protein per total volume is 734 which is down from 2138 on February 17. Interestingly enough it was 632 on January 23. Dad and I did not notice that January reading until we left so we will ask via email tomorrow. We went through our whole list of questions and really did not learn anything different than what we had already figured out through reading (and chatting with Krista).

When Dr. Thomas arrived she was very concerned that Mom has been running a low temperature. She told us that Dexamethasone can "mask" a fever so the temperature may have been higher than it was registering. So ... antibiotics, blood work and urine analysis start tonight ... adding to our already long day.

Mom has also been complaining of pain in her rib cage and her clavicle ... so guess what ... we added a visit to x-ray prior to our departure.

We got more drugs for indigestion, depression and sleep ... and the antibiotics mentioned above. We are driving home now at 9pm and will start back to MD Anderson tomorrow morning at 8am. Tomorrow we met with rehab (Konzen), pain (Ting) and stem cell transplantation (Jones).

We did learn that Mom is responding very well to the cancer drugs. We will start the next cycle as soon as we figure out what is causing the fever (we thought we would start tomorrow). The goal is to make the Bence Jones as low as possible ... as in zero. Tomorrow we will find out if she is a candidate for stem cell transplantation. It requires high dose chemotherapy but it is the most effective at getting folks into CR (complete recovery). More tomorrow! Keep praying!