Over the course of a disease as serious as cancer, you tend to have highs and lows. One of the most important things that you need to do is to stay away from being too high or too low. I like to look at my fight as similar to a baseball season. There are going to be times that I go to the plate and hit a home run. There will be other times when I look like a rusty gate trying to hit a 100 mile per hour fastball. If you get upset with every failure, you will be forever in the dumps. Get too excited about a single result and you tend to set yourself up for a future failure.
Late last year, I was in a real slump. The results just kept getting worse and worse and I could see myself heading for more chemotherapy, the equivalent of 6th place. (For those keeping track, last place would be something nearing a confrontation with the Grim Reaper.) Going back to work that day was not easy, but vacation was on the horizon so things weren’t all bad.
I come back from vacation and all of a sudden I’m at the beginning of a hit streak, a hit streak that would last all the way to May. Life was good. I was going to beat this yet. Then I hit a little bump in the road and my numbers went up for the first time all year. Of course, I took it a little harder than Dr. Mikhael, but then he might just know a little more about this than me. (You don’t know how hard that was for me to admit.)
I didn’t get too worried, but it starts to get you thinking and as Julia might tell you, that always gets me in trouble. However, I did my best to keep my concerns in check.
So now it was time to take my first test back at Dr. Obenchain’s. At least I would get to see Jerri and Sami. That was the thinking anyway.
I showed up for what I thought was an 8 AM appointment only to find that there wasn’t going to be anyone there until 9 AM. Luckily, it was very close to work, so I just went to work for the next hour. When I got back to Dr. Obenchain’s, I found out that the nurse that would actually do the draw was running late. To my horrors, it wouldn’t be either Jerri or Sami as Jerri was on vacation and Sami was working full time at the hospital. Things were starting to slowly trickle downhill.
I became just a little concerned when there was some uncertainty as to what type of tube would be used for the all important “lambda free light chain” test. After several telephone calls, it was decided that the blue toped tube would be used. Not sure how any of that makes a difference, because they didn’t cover that on “ER.” Then the exciting part happened when the nurse couldn’t get any blood out of my right arm. After poking around for a while, it was on to the left arm. Luckily, the left arm worked because I was quickly running out of arms.
Because this was a new testing lab, I decided that no matter what the result, I would not get too excited. If it was extremely high or low, I might give it some thought, but I just wanted to stay on an even keel. The results, although on a different scale, came in better than I could have imagined. The scale used was 10 times higher that what the Mayo uses so making that correction, I came in at a level of 42.9. Putting this on the same scale as the Mayo, it would read 4.29. This would represent the biggest drop I have had since the days of chemo.
In addition, this is getting close to “normal.” As previously discussed, I’ve never been normal in most ways, but this sure is one area that I would like to try. Again, I am guarding against getting too high on this because it is a different lab with potentially different standards. However, the high end of normal is 2.63, which means that if I improve as much the next two months as I did the last two, I would be in the normal range. Not sure what that would mean, but it sure is better than the alternative. Maybe I’m back on my hitting streak. Joe DiMaggio look out! Well maybe I shouldn’t get too excited. Look out Wee Willie Keeler!
