Tag: #Waldenstrom

I am very late in writing this, but I do think it needs to be documented. My fourth session of chemo was postponed due to the shingles, and I only received it on 27/28 March (instead of on March 7/8). By that time my shingles had disappeared, I was/am on a preventative dosage of antivirals and my white blood cell had recovered well enough to tolerate the further poisoning of my body. I was, of course, extremely apprehensive about this

Spoiler alert: I have shingles. !!!!!! So, in the last week of February, I moved house. It was a very easy move, since I had purged what seemed like half my house during a very intense KonMari period, and I had excellent movers to assist. I can honestly say I barely lifted a finger. Still, any move is stressful to some degree, and I guess this one was too. By the beginning of March, the first Saturday and Sunday to

After the last disastrous round of chemo, I was very apprehensive about doing round three. I was actually quite petrified. I walked into my oncologists office with two goals: to ask for any meds available to make the day easier and to see if I could shorten the chemo from six sessions down to four. I love my oncologist because she really listens to me and takes what I say seriously, while also bringing a level of authority and knowledge

(Note: This is a boring, technical post about my chemo. It is written only for the benefit of others who might be anticipating the same treatment, or who are receiving the treatment and want to compare notes. If you are not a WM sufferer, you probably want to move on 🙂 ) I walked into the second round of chemo slightly apprehensive, but overall very confident that “I’ve got this“. The joke, clearly, was on me. It is quite safe

The long road of treatment started with my first round of chemo on Wednesday and Thursday. It wasn’t nearly as bad as some expected, but it wasn’t a walk in the park either. First of all, as you can tell from the title of this post, I waited quite some time from my diagnosis to start the chemo. That is not that unusual for Waldenstrom patients, who can in fact be put on the “watch and wait” regiment for years

It’s been a bit of a rollercoaster ride and much of it has been related to the doctors’ approach to my illness. My first doctor, the one who actually diagnosed Waldenstrom’s, told me that she suspects it before it was officially confirmed with the bone marrow test. She also told me that “if you are going to get cancer, this is the one to get” which, let’s be honest, is about as positive as you can be. When she did

Ha ha! So I got my CT scan results today, and honestly…I can only laugh. To give context: the point of the CT Scan, in my case, is to stage the Lymphoma. Technically, since it is already in the bone marrow (by definition), Waldenstrom’s is considered a Stage 4 cancer. Nevertheless, it needs to be staged so that progression can be tracked, and the best way to do that is to check the organs (especially spleen for enlargement) but even