The word you love to hear: Remission

!!!!!!!!!!!!!

At 1:30 on Friday I had a quick little surgery/bone marrow aspirate to get a sample of my bone marrow. By 5 the pathologist had looked at a sample and found no abnormal cells. To date the most incredible moment of my entire life – I was nowhere near out of the woods but it was the first great news (other than my brother being a donor) we had received among lots of other horrible news (love having the most aggressive high-risk subtype of the most aggressive type of leukemia).

A few hours ago I got the call that my minimum residual disease is negative. For those of you who are not super familiar with cancer that means I am in REMISSION!!!!!

Since Ph+ AML is so aggressive, protocol is to always do a bone marrow transplant once you get to remission. If everything goes according to plan, I will start the chemo for my bone marrow transplant in 2-3 days and have shiny new bone marrow in less than two weeks! Bone marrow transplants are unfortunately no joke – the chemo is more aggressive than any other type (since it has to kill all of the bone marrow) and they have tons of side effects including the digestive system ‘sloughing off’ (ugh ew), graft versus host disease, mouth sores, fever/illness, bone pain, and tons of other suffering. I will be in the hospital about two months and then will be home counting down to day 100 which is the official end of the transplant if it all goes well.

I have so much more to say but right now my brain is so so scrambly so I’ll just list some stuff I’ve done at home: Baker Beach followed by an ambient Taco Bell dinner in the car (s/o Amanda and Miles), two perfect brunches with family, a picnic in San Francisco, walking the family bunny, tons of home-cooked food, half an immune system, Bi-Rite ice cream, dinner at my sister’s new apartment, a day at Stanford, so much love and happiness and a weird (uncomfortable?) hiatus from illness.