Life's Journey with Multiple Myeloma

We went to see the Transplant Doctor, Dr Reddy today.  Dr Reddy will be harvesting Alpesh’s stem cells and will potentially do the transplant if Alpesh ever needs it. 

We shared all the results with him and interestingly enough he had another opinion regarding the bone marrow and the plasmacytomas. 

With regards to the bone marrow, at 6% plasma cells, Dr Reddy still feels that there is contamination and that the bone marrow is not clean of myeloma cells.  Apparently a normal person would have anything below 5% so he feels that the 1% or so that Alpesh has in his marrow are myeloma cells.

His opinion with regards to the plasmacytomas is that since they have not shrunk much with the RDV combination, he believes we should use another strong chemo drug, Cytoxan which has the dual purpose of “cleaning” the bone marrow and plasmacytomas further and will also be used to get Alpesh ready for the stem cell harvest.

Therefore, as it stands currently the plan is as follows:

• Thursday, January 29^th – administer Cytoxan involving an overnight stay in hospital
• Sunday, February 1^st – Start 10 days of Neupogen (by injection) which will help to mobilize (float) the stem cells in the blood
• Monday, February 9^th – Stem Cell Harvest

 As mentioned yesterday Alpesh will be having a Pet Scan to determine the “hot spots” in the plasmacytomas and after harvesting, Dr Reddy also agreed with Dr Lonial and Dr Z that radiation therapy could be used to “zap” whatever is left.

We have decided to go with Dr Reddy’s plan to administer the Cytoxan because we feel that we would like to do whatever is possible to ensure the stem cells that are collected are as “clean” as possible.  In the process, if the hot spots in the plasmacytomas are reduced, that will be an added bonus. 

[by Sima]

This entry was posted on January 22, 2009 at 9:29 pm and is filed under Results. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.