Cruise Control

I went down to Stanford last week for my latest appointment with Dr. Coutre.  The lab numbers were not in yet (even though I got there over an hour early!), so I don't know how the lab is going to assess my progress or lack thereof.  (Is it progress if the numbers progress to a worse level, or is it progress if my counts are stable and/or improved.  I vote for the latter.)

From a purely subjective standpoint, I feel fine and am able to do pretty much what I want physically.  I think it has taken me about six months to pretty much fully recover from my hospital stays.  That's a long time, and thinking back, I was pretty much wiped out in January and February.  I couldn't drive, I couldn't make it to the end of the street even with a cane.  Now I am driving to Stanford and elsewhere, I did some roof repairs that necessitated me carrying shingles up the ladder, and ripping off damaged shingles, and even using new plywood to replaced some damaged sections.  (The whole problem started unnoticed some time ago when I lost a single shingle to a wind storm, and didn't notice it.)

My attitude to the lack of numbers from Stanford is that since I've not heard from Dr. Coutre, all's pretty much well.  At least I like to think so.  I see him in a month.  I'll repeat my scans in December or January.

In addition, I'll see Dr. Kipps next month in San Diego.  I'll get to fly the no-frills Southwest, which has the only non-stop from Sacramento to San Diego.  I hope things go well there.  Dr. Kipps is more of a worrier than Dr. Coutre, so I expect a somber analysis from Kipps.  But I will get to pump him on new treatments.  Of course the one trial I'm interested in apart from CAL-101/GS-1101 is a trial educating the T-lymphocytes to attack and destroy CLL cells.  A cure would be very, very nice.  To get back to the business of living without having to worry about my immune system.

Perhaps an impossible dream for me, but one can only hope, can't one?