I was scheduled to go into the hospital on Monday, March 3, 2014 for my 3rd round of consolidation chemo. After calling Dr. Brinker and him looking over my blood work for the back 2 1/2 weeks he decided, and I agree, that we will wait until my counts are higher. We will continue blood work and see how things are at the end of next week.
Today I am still neutropenic. Which means that the white blood cells that fight infection are considered to low to do that job. We want this number, also called ANC (Absolute Neutrophil Count), to be above 1.0. Mine has been above that, but today it was 0.8. Since it is fluctuating we are going to wait and hope for some higher numbers by the end of next week.
Last time I was admitted for chemo my bone marrow was fluctuating and we went ahead and did chemo anyways. This has made it so that my bone marrow is taking longer to recover. As Dr. Brinker and I discussed it does no good to knock out my immune system if it takes weeks and weeks to recover and I end up back in the hospital because of it. We need the chemo to reset the bone marrow and for it to recover in a couple of weeks not a month or longer.
So for now this is the best decision for me. It will draw things out a little longer but hoping to be able to do the final round in 4 weeks instead of 7 or 8.
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