Lets face it, some of you just check the blog for Leroy Brown pics. Hey I am not judging. I get it all the Cancer talk gets a little much. Sometimes you are in the mood to peep some pics of adorable dog and move on with your day. So lets talk about LB a bit. If you have been paying attention you know he is a little over a year old and takes great pictures. I have yet to go out of my way to get a picture of the blog I just review what my wife and I have taken the last week and post the best one.

You get to see LB happy and behaving. He is snuggling or doing something fun and cute. You don’t see the times he does zoomys through the house knocking things down and causing chaos usually reserved for stampeding mastiffs. He is the first dog we ever had that continues to attempt to beg and demand table food even though he has rarely ever gotten anything.

He also sounds like Flipper when he has these meltdowns. You are going to want your sound on for this.

This goes on for a solid 20+ minutes unless he is acknowledged. He also likes to sneak down to the basement and leave us “presents”. Yes these presents are of the biological variety and no appreciated by the people he is leaving them for. I will save you from the pictures of that.

From 10am to 3pm LB is a well behaved cuddle monster. Sometime after 3pm he puts on his crazy pants and basically goes ape shit for a couple hours. So right when you finish with work and sit down for dinner he is in ludicrous mode. Nothing in life doesn’t have some down side or another.

Point being I’ve been riding down hill for most of this treatment. No real side effects, red and white blood cells in the normal range, and killing cancers as far as we know. Apparently the latter is no longer true. Three weeks ago we noticed that the indicators don’t appear to be going in the right direction. They aren’t really moving that much however the little movement is not in the right direction.

This is where we get into some math. If that’s not your thing you can skip this paragraph. It’s only more details describing how these are measured. There are two things they measure free kappa LT chains and kappa/lamdba ratio. The ideal is to have these have a ratio for zero. For the math challenged that means as close to even as possible. This is normally achieved by making the free kappa live free and die off. Unfortunately they don’t ride their motorcycles without a helmet so we need treatments for that. For the first couple of cycles this was going well I started at 1300+ and went down to 375 of those free wheeling kappas. Now we are at 484 and increasing by less then 10 over the last 3 weeks. So that was a lot of information, for hanging in there how about a Leroy GIF before wrapping this up?

So now what? Good question and I don’t have all the answers. I am going to lay out what I know in quick easy bullet points since this blog has gotten too cancery.

• These tests are just indicators and we might be still heading towards remission. In which case no harm no foul.
• The chemo I am on always loses it’s effectiveness eventually.  They all do over time however in most cases it doesn’t happen until you go through remission a couple times over years.
• They have other drugs to try to get the last mile to remission if needed.  My Doc is consulting with experts in Dana Farber and Lahey Oncology to get their opinion on which would be the best.
• Last week was a “off week” and I don’t think anyone expected to see a dip in the numbers.  I start my forth cycle today so we will see what happens.
• Like Leroy it’s likely not going to be all good news all the time.  At this point it’s wait and see.  Once I finish the cycle there will be discussions with the doc and I will have a better idea on the next steps.
• For now I am just happy to know there are many other options should they be needed but not interested in going down the what if rabbit hole until I know we need to.

Quick update on the back situation. Slowly and (yes I said slowly so please save your well meaning “don’t over do it”). I have been more and more active. This week I am doing two days in the office. I went to the work jam rehearsal last night and found I can not stand and play guitar for a prolonged period of time. So I grabbed a chair. See people I am “listening to my body”. All in all we are making progress with the physical therapy. Now since you hung in there for all these words I am going to give you one more BONUS Leroy picture.