Back At Top Of The Wave

Good morning everyone.

I hope your week has started off well. On my end, I couldn’t have dreamed about a better start.

So, you remember I was waiting for my stem cells to grow and eventually be able to produce enough blood cells to get my immune system back? Well, over the last week, the numbers for my white blood cells (WBC, the immune system) doubled everyday, starting almost from zero last Monday. For the last three days, numbers were getting at decent levels. And finally yesterday, my WBC reached THE threshold required so I could stop the precautions I have been taking during the time I had no immune system (called neutropenic precautions). Yay!!!

In other words, it means that I have now enough WBC to fight infections, so no more preventive strong antibiotics to take everyday, no more cleaning the whole house 10 times a day, I can eat raw foods again, including raw veggies and fruits, I can go in other places other than the house and my cancer care center, I can share an ice cream with the same spoon with my kids, and the most important thing of all, I can French kiss my lovely wife! Isn’t cool?

To illustrate what I am talking about, I made a graph (see below). The green line shows my WBC count over the last two months, and the blue and yellow lines show the normal range for WBC. You can see that in July, when we boosted my system thanks to growth factor injections in order to collect my stem cells, my WBC count was super, supe high. Then, in August, after the high dose chemo, it slowly hit the bottom until it rose again, slowly, until back on track yesterday. Isn’t cool stuff? I think so too 🙂

Of course, there is still a long way to go. For instance, my platelets are still very low, reason why there is another set of precautions I need to follow during that time. But hopefully, they are expected to be back to normal this week. Lastly, I may have a new immune system, but it is 12 days old, which means that like a new born, I am going to have to strengthen it over time. Good stuff.

You see, you got so knowledgeable about WBC all the sudden.

See you for the next story.