Life's Journey with Multiple Myeloma

As mentioned in our last post, this is the week of truth for us as Alpesh is under-going multiple tests to determine how his insides responded to the four cycles of chemo.  This is what he has had to endure this week:

• MRI – With almost 4hrs of MRI’s this week, we got a phone call this afternoon asking him to come back tomorrow for an additional test.  We are not sure if this is good or bad.  Did they find something new and they need a better look?  Did one of the MRIs not come out too well or our most positive thought is that they couldn’t find the tumors and they want to check again to make sure.  Here’s hoping ….
• Bone Survey – They literally took X-rays of every part of Alpesh’s body, from head to toe. I am guessing that it must have been about fifteen X-rays!
• Pulmonary Function Test – This was an interesting one.  They sat Alpesh in a glass chamber, pinched his nose closed with a clip (if he had goggles, he would have looked like a synchronized swimmer!) and made him breathe through his mouth.  The purpose was to test his lungs both in terms of capacity and resistance.  The person who performed the test seemed pleased with the results.
• MUGA Scan – We had to Google this one before we went J   In this test, they drew two vials of Alpesh’s blood, then they mixed the blood with a radioactive tracer and re-injected it into Alpesh so that they could watch how the blood flowed through his heart.  They took a video of how the heart is functioning in terms of blood flow and the valves.  He had to lay in one of those time capsule machines for about 20 mins while the camera recorded his heart’s activity from three different angles.
• EKG – Pretty common test. It’s a recording of the electrical activity of the heart
• BMB – Bone Marrow Biopsy.    This was the worst to watch and the nurses even suggested I leave the room but I said I would look away if I had to – I wasn’t going to leave him.   They numbed the area on his rear pelvic bone and using a hollow needle, they pierced right through into his bone and sucked out some bone marrow.  This was particularly nasty!    It looked really painful and afterwards, Alpesh confirmed that it was …L  Then they used what looked like a corkscrew to screw into his skin and bone to take a sample of his bone.  They had to do that twice because they didn’t get a good sample the first time. 
• Blood tests – In one sitting, they drew twelve vials (!) of blood for various tests.  The first vein they used went dry after the eighth vial and they had to find another to do the other four.

The results should all be back early next week and we will share as soon as we can. 

[by Sima]

This entry was posted on January 14, 2009 at 10:01 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.