Dr. Tricot happy with progress

We went to the BMT clinic this morning for a meeting with Dr. Tricot scheduled for 9:00 but with a request that we arrive 30 minutes early, which we did, and he actually came into the conference room a few minutes before 9:00. I had requested a printout of the March 17 bloodwork and therefore knew that the Kappa free light chains determination was at 9.63 mg/dL long before Dr. Tricot got around to discussing results after his examination of me, both verbal and physical. Nancy had arrived a few minutes after Dr. Tricot and then proceedings were delayed twice by urgent cell phone calls for the good doctor. He finished his dictation of the next letter that I will get in several days and then asked if I had any questions and when I asked how I am doing he said "very well." I told him I had plotted the Myeloma marker numbers since Dec. 28 and that if the general slope had been maintained the value would have approached zero on the day of the last lab work. He smiled and said the values drop slowly as time goes by and that I will be on the same maintenance schedule until next December, because the 2 early cycles of one each didn't count. He also said the Kappa free light chains had been at 694 before they began treating me and that the drop to 9.6 was a huge improvement, but the first printout of bloodwork that I got showed the first value to be 671.

Dr. Trcot changed my medication schedule because the blood work on March 17 showed considerable improvement in several of the elements and compounds found in my blood. He eliminated the iron supplement pill (because I no longer am anemic) and reduced to three the number of times I take carafate and to 2 the number of times I take calcium + Vit. D each day. He also increased to 75mg the thyroid pill that I take (had been 50mg). I had just renewed the prescription Friday. I told Jennifer about the renewal and she said it will be ok to finish taking them and then use the new prescription she had given me. Instead I am going to take 2 of the 50mg pills every other day before starting on the 75mg pills.

We had to wait at the pharmacy and while waiting finally made contact with Dr. Curtis' office and learned that he would be available until 11:15. That news to the pharmacy could not hurry them so we left and raced to St. Mark's Hospital where Dr. Curtis has his office. We did not make it by 11:15 but they accepted us and we had another wait before seeing him. Then a trip back to the Huntsman Cancer Institute to get my prescriptions and to have a late lunch.