November 5,2013.. I felt much better today than I did during the evening hours last night. I took the last of the Dexamethasone (this is what is causing the high blood sugar and fluid retention) this morning. I mentioned in another post that I was on VDT-PACE chemo. The D stands for Dexamethasone. Tonight I will finish with the Thalidomide. This is the T in the VDT-PACE  This Thalidomide prescription had to be special ordered the last time I was here and I had to personally talk with the sender. They keep really tight control on who gets it due to the bad birth defects it caused in the 1960s. One prescription cost over  $7,200 for 28 capsules. I will be off the remainder of the chemo tomorrow after the disconnect at 3pm. It will be good to not have to carry this around 24 hours a day, and taking a shower sure will be easier each night. It took me awhile to figure how I was going to do that with the pumps attached to me, but found it quite easy since the shower has a removable shower head on a long metal hose.

In the waiting room today, we met a lady we had seen earlier this year but had never talked with her. She is from California and drives here for treatment. She knew quite a bit about my new doctor (Zangari). She said as soon as word gets out that he is here, people will be flocking to see him. She said I was really fortunate to get him as my doctor. She said he would be her choice of any doctor here. That all sounded like good news to me. We plan to go to a question and answer session Thursday night where Dr. Zangari will be answering questions along with the director of MIRT, Dr. Bart Barlogie. By the way, Dr Barlogie is one of the top doctors in the world in Multiple Myeloma. He sure is different. He is about my age and rides one of the high speed motorcycles (one like the young guys ride). Each day, I see his motorcycle sitting in front of the hospital. It is has been there each night when we leave. The other night it was there when we left about 7pm. We also saw it there both days on the weekend. We look at going to the question/answer session as a real opportunity to be able to hear one of the top authorities in the world on this cancer.

I have previously mentioned some of my lab numbers. I thought I would show you one of the daily reports. Two days a week, I get additional blood drawn to check the Myeloma markers. I had one drawn yesterday but I have not yet gotten the results. We made these photos using the Ipad. Sorry they are not better. The paper appears dirty but it was a shadow on the page.

As you can see, my lab results today were... white count..2.65, hemoglobin..9.0, platelets..158.