Hi Toby and Helen and Dusk
great to hear from you all. Here’s where I’m at… I finished my fifth and final VTD on 22nd July, and achieved zero para proteins and minus 5% plasma cells. Yay, break out the champagne! So even more the question to transplant or not raised its head. So in mid August I’m referred to a new consultant who will oversea the transplant process and so I ask him, what will the transplant achieve with my levels at ‘normal’. He explained it very well and has helped me feel so much more confident that this is the right thing to do. He said imagin an iceberg, everything that is known and understood about myeloma and how to treat it, is what sits above the water. A lot of what is yet to be understood about the disease is the iceberg below the water. So even though the treatment has got my levels to ‘normal’, the iceberg still lurks below the water, what the transplant does is pushes the disease even further below the water line and so achieving a deeper remission. So onward and upward, transplant here I come. I meet again with my transplant consultant on Thursday and expect to get a time frame and dates, but definitely not before the 19th sept, I’ve got my best friends 40th that day and she’d kill (long before myeloma) if I missed it!!
I have to say, having fairly sailed through three months of VCD and then three months of VTD with minimal side effects, the first two weeks being drug free I felt pretty rubbish, that took me by surprise. The come down from the drugs maybe. I’m now on a number of supplements to get me up to full strength ready for the transplant.
Charlie xx
