The latest

Saw Dr. Kipps on Tuesdays, the only day he pretty much sees patients. I had some CLL friends in San Diego who were very nice and ferried me around a bit, picked me up from the Cancer Center and helped me get around. Also, they took me out to dinner at a place called Milton's. It's a Jewish-style restaurant in La Jolla. It was very good; the pastrami was excellent. I had a soda called Dr. Jones (I think) and it's apparently a NY classic that you just can't get many places. It was good and made me feel a bit of a connection to NY, which I've been to exactly one time (to see an herbalist who cured one man of CLL, though no one else, to my knowledge).

Dr. Kipps is worried about me, since my counts are still in the tank. He suspects something else is going on. He wants me to start treatment again, giving me four different trial consent documents. Combined with re-doing flavopiridol or Cal-101 at Stanford, that makes six different protocols. That's if my beaten-up marrow has not transformed. He seemed pretty worried, and gave me a hug.

The bone marrow biopsy was pretty painful, even with the percocet I insist upon. (That was a problem in itself; Dr. Kipps apparently forgot to send the prescription over, so his nurse had to track down this busy man, and get him to write a script.)

So I am now waiting and worrying over what this latest biopsy will show. He said my last biopsy in May was fairly normal, and he doesn't understand why my counts are so terribly low (especially the white blood count) when the marrow looks OK.

There may be something else going on...