Tag: Dr. Jalil

I was laid off again yesterday

And today, as they say, is the first day of the rest of my life, again.

Most recently, I was unemployed roughly from June 2009 through February 2010. That was a difficult time to be unemployed. The economy was a wreck, and would remain so for a couple more years. (Some will say it’s not much better, and that’s true).

I’m up early for the day – it’s about 1:50 am as I write. I hardly know where to begin. I’m thinking “Dun & Bradstreet” lists; I’m thinking “Eloqua” – I’m tagging this post “Eloqua” because I consider that to be the primary job skill I’ve picked up in the last few years. My hope is that it’s not an insignificant one.

Eloqua is “database marketing” and “marketing automation” rolled into one. I’m a member at http://www.ritesite.com – which I haven’t used for a while. I’ve been told “LinkedIn” is now a fabulous resource. I’m going to check it out. My hope is to morph this site into a job search site. Whatever that means.

For those of you who have come here, looking for news about my wife and her struggle with CMML leukemia, I guess you could say “no news is good news”. There is no sign of the recurrence of the disease. There are some annoying things going on.

For a while I had a series called “Vampire Bride”. She was getting blood transfusions on a fairly regular basis. As it turns out, with blood transfusions, iron accumulates in your body, and it can be damaging over time. So now they are “bleeding” her – taking a pint of blood out each week, (and I think they need to do this eight times), because the iron levels in her blood are too high. (What about “Geritol”?)

Plus, her immune system is brand new. So she has NO immunities built up. And so, she has managed to catch virtually every cold and bug that has come down the pike this winter.

Very high on my list of concerns will be to provide health care coverage for her. She’s a veteran, and she’s in the VA system, but moving to the VA system would force her to lose her current medical team – Dr Rossetti, Dr Jalil, and their whole group at West Penn Hospital. They saved her life, literally, and Beth is still in need of this ongoing type of treatment. They are familiar with her case. My hope would be to see it through.

On my end, it’s a whole different world. Eloqua is a whole new “job skill”. “Marketing automation” is a whole new world. The world of “social media” is completely new, since the last time I looked for a job.

For now, “job-one” is to craft a quasi-kind of plan, which can go out the door once the bullets start flying.

An important update to the blood charts

One of the more vexing issues for us has been the notion (a) that Beth’s levels needed to be under control before the transplant to maximize her chances for success, and (b) the key number that we were watching, the hemoglobin level, was continuing to go down through these treatments.

Yesterday’s intake meeting was an important milestone for us, not least because I accidentally stumbled upon a chart that contained all of Beth’s blood numbers, not just one day at a time, but in chart form. Dr. Jalil had one of these charts for roughly the period in July and early August, and Dr. Rossetti graciously had one printed for me with the most current numbers.

A more complete blood chart, as of 8/23/2011

These charts had some numbers that I had simply not seen before, because I was asking the various office staffs to send the individual blood numbers, and I wasn’t always receiving them.

I’ve updated and reproduced the chart here, using some of the missing numbers and there are some really important things to note. First, look at the Blasts level. In July, they went way up, after the first cycle of Vidaza. We hadn’t seen this. And after the second cycle of Vidaza they went down to zero. That’s a critical level, because these are the cancer cells. Note also, the Blasts level went up a bit later in August as well. But after this cycle of Vidaza, I think we can expect to see some more zeroes.

Note too, the Hemoglobin levels went up just a bit between August 11 and August 15. That small rise was attributable not to a transfusion, but just to her own system raising her hemoglobin level. In fact, she may not have required a transfusion after August 11 (on August 18), given that level of 8.7 on August 15, but she got one anyway.

Her White Blood Cells, Platelets, and Neutrophils (especially these) are seeming to moderate, closer to the normal range over time. This is exclusively a function of the Vidaza.

So while we had been looking at just one number, Hemoglobin, and not seeing much progress there, the doctors had been looking at some of the other numbers, and that whole picture was a much more hopeful one.