Ok so I lost my umph.. I've put a few months to waste and didn't record anything while I was doing it. So this is what's been happening since my last entry...

    As I mentioned, I wasn’t happy just hanging around and waiting for my cancer to come back and I let my feelings be known to both Dr Cooper and Dr Levy. They both ended up seeing my points and we started the process for an autologus transplant in late December (after my last chemo treatment). While I was going to New Haven every day to try and mobilize my stem cells (really more for the test that takes a couple of hours to see if I have enough stem cells), Dr Cooper thought about another option. He told me about a t-cell transplant that would use another persons (allogenic) cells but would wave a magic wand over them to help eliminate/reduce the chances of developing graft vs host disease. Well I was game, it sounded like exactly what I wanted. We continued to try and mobilize my cells but gave up after about a week. At this point it was the first week of January and the plan was to wait.. and wait.. and wait.. for Dr Cooper to gather my info, send it to Sloan-Kettering (the only place that does these types of transplants) and get an appointment for me. Well.. I waited and waited and waited.. Flash forward to the end of January, I got a little impatient and WAY bored so I started applying pressure to Dr Cooper. Amazingly I got a hold of him via email and was impressed with his communication. Turns out that he presented my case to Sloan and they were to discuss it and let us know whether they thought I was a good candidate or not.. Whoa! Hold the phone! You mean there is a chance that I’m not going to transplant? You mean I could end up just going back to work and my “normal” life? It was at this point that I started to be romanced by the idea that I could return to my life and it could all be over. It didn’t matter anymore that we could just hang tight and wait for the cancer to return, if it returned. Hmmm.. Well Sloan came back and said that they didn’t think it would be that beneficial for me to go thru with the transplant but they wanted to see me anyway.. ug! I have to go all the way to NYC for them to look at me and tell me that they aren’t interested in my case? That annoyed me but Dr Cooper really wanted me to go, so I went. My appointment was for mid February (last week). I was not impressed with Sloan but I was impressed with Dr. P. Even though my appointment was for 9am and I didn’t actually see her until 12, she spent a bit of time explaining stuff. The reality is that there is no right answer and its pretty much all a guessing game. At this point, I am 9 months out from my remission (probably closer to 10) and my chances for recurrence have decreased considerably over the past few months.. and the longer I go in remission, the better my chances of staying in remission. While the transplant would give me great odds of a cure (75%), the mortality rate of the transplant itself is 20%. That’s a big number. Currently my cure rate is like 45-50% so Dr P doesn’t feel that it would be worth the risk. Of course there is SO much more to it but I’m not a scientist (yet) and don’t feel comfortable explaining it.. but that’s the jist.

    So here I am, a little paranoid, but healthy. I am returning to work in early March, just after my vacation that I promised my kids. I will see my oncologist every 3-4 weeks for a while (hopefully forever) and we’ll hope and pray that I stay healthy. That’s the plan.