Finally, some good news!

I was scheduled to have more intrathecal chemotherapy (chemo injected into the spinal fluid) on Monday, but my doctor decided to hold off on the chemo and just check the spinal fluid for leukemia. Chemo lowers my white blood cell count, and he doesn't want me to run super low counts, so he was hoping we'd be able to hold chemo for another week if the spinal fluid came back clear. Otherwise I would have gotten more chemo later this week.

Good news: only 1 white blood cell per mm3, and none of them were leukemia cells!

Chemo is rescheduled for next Monday now. Why do I have such annoying cancer? Seriously, it keeps coming back to bite me, but then it dies off quickly. The dying off quickly is good, but can't they just stay away in the first place?

It turned out to be a good thing that I had so many problems with my platelets for so many months. The reason I had a lumbar puncture when I did, at the end of April, rather than the end of March, like I was supposed to, is that my platelets were low and they had trouble getting any fluid out. When I finally had the LP in April, we caught the leukemia really, really early when there were very few cells around. In March they likely wouldn't have seen anything, and I wouldn't have been scheduled for another LP until June at my six month post transplant check up, by which time I would have been FOL - full of leukemia.

I am a lucky girl.