We had good news yesterday on Adrian’s progress. He is officially in clinical remission. What a huge relief and a big step forward on the road to a full recovery.
We had gone to Children’s for our weekly set of appointments on Friday, one of which was the MRD (minimal residual disease) test which we talked about in our last post. While all of the blood and bone marrow tests leading up to the MRD indicated that AJ was responding well to treatment and was an early responder, the MRD test is used to definitively confirm remission. We got the results yesterday, which indicate his blast count is around 1% (healthy people have 1-2% blasts in their marrow – these are just immature white blood cells), and within the blasts the pathologists did not find any abnormal or leukemic cells. Zero.
As of Friday all of AJ’s blood counts continue to be strong, and in some cases even on the high side given that his recovering bone marrow is now slightly over-shooting normal ranges for some blood cell types. This is normal, and we hope to see blood counts stabilizing over time.
Now that he is in remission, AJ is able to move into the next phase of treatment, called “Consolidation” therapy. This phase is a bit less intense than the Induction phase. It requires taking daily chemotherapy pills in addition to an IV chemo injection at the start and weekly spinal injections. We’ll begin this four week phase next Monday.
Overall, Adrian seems to be feeling pretty good, other than the extra weight he is carrying (which should start to go away now that we are tapering him off the steroids) and the heat wave we are experiencing here. Temperatures in Bellevue are supposed to reach 100 degrees today. After living in the Seattle area for 10 years, we’ve never had air conditioning, but two days ago we had to break down and buy a window AC unit to temporarily help us cool off our house which was becoming unbearably hot. AJ and Camille never complained about it being too hot, but we can’t imagine making someone who’s undergoing chemotherapy put up with the heat.
Other than that, we’ve been able to take him on a few outings, including to a movie this past weekend (Ice Age III). It feels really good to get out and do normal things.
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