We have good news to report on the Lily front, although the good news doesn’t change anything, really. When Lily’s bone marrow was sent to the national clinical study, they found a chromosomal marker that puts her in the “low risk” category. Previously she was in the “standard risk” category which mean that for the clinical trial, she would have been placed in the standard treatment arm of the study OR the more intensive treatment arm. However, now that she is “low risk”, she won’t even have the possibility of the intensive treatment. She may be placed in an arm that has one additional chemo - but it’s nothing like the intensive part of the other arm. So, she still has two and a half years of chemo ahead of her, and it will be very rough. However, we don’t have the anticipation of that awful intensive chemo.

And that is good since she is so sensitive to the chemo and has all the bad side effects for them all. She’s already lost her hair - and only 5-10 per cent of patients lose their hair in the first phase of treatment, induction, which is what she just completed. She has awful stomach and jaw pains, along with muscle weakness - other side effects that most patients don’t have at this point in the treatment.

My prayer is for her strength to get through all the chemotherapy, and then for there not to be “late effects” from the chemotherapy. There are possible long-term physical, mental, developmental and emotional effects from the chemotherapy.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 7th, 2009 at 5:31 am and is filed under Lily's Leukemia Journey. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.