Happy tranplant anniversary to me!

One year ago I received transplant #2!  Today I am in complete remission and an looking forward to spending a fun filled summer with the family.  A summer that will involve a real vacation to the beach and will not involve traveling to Little Rock!  Don't get me wrong, I love me some Little Rock...but trips there always involves a bone marrow biopsy and the stress of waiting for the results, plus it's HOT there in the summer so I'll be happy not going until the end of September.  :)

It was all good news from my last trip there in the beginning of May.  I tried to post from the bone marrow biopsy waiting room, but since iPad is frustratingly not so Blogger friendly I manged to delete it pretty much immediately.  Then I just just completely flaked on trying to recreate it. 

My main observation in that attempted post was that the bone marrow biopsy waiting room is like myleoma social hour.  Everyone is always so chatty...sharing war stories and such.  I'm convinced it's because all the patients are all hopped up on their pre-meds.  One fentanyl lollipop here, two ativan there.  Makes for a lots of interesting conversation.  :)

Now back to the test results.  I think the worst part of each trip to Arkansas is waiting in the intake room for the nurse to print off all the test results and prepare the chart to send you off to the doctor.  They hand you the printouts that hold all the answers you have been waiting for.  For me it's then a race to see how fast I can flip to the bone marrow pathology report.  My heart is always racing and I'm definitely holding my breath as I scan down.  Thankfully it was again a huge sigh of relief to see there was no trace of myeloma!  My light chains are also normal, and some of my smaller bone lesions have healed.  I still have a long way to go with the lesions, but having some of them disappear is a good start.  I was Dr. B's fist patient and he was in a fabulous mood.  It was a day after his birthday (he immediately requested the happy birthday balloons be removed from his office after I mentioned it...ha!), and since he literally had just arrived nothing had yet gone wrong for him to get worked up over.  He wants me to just keep on with the maintenance (revlimid daily, velcade and dex weekly) and keep getting zometa monthly to hopefully help promote healing of the remaining lesions.  Those are the biggest concern for giving any residual or new cancerous cells a place to take hold.  My immune system and the maintenance can handle mopping up a low level, but once all the damaged places in the bones heal I'll be breathing much easier.  He also reduced my dex dose pretty much immediately when he saw me.  Treatment day was the day before, so I was coming down of the dex when I went in.  I'm always very flushed the next day.  The reduced dose seems to be helping me feel not quite so terrible the next morning so that's a good thing. 

So now it's time to enjoy the summer with my family.  Olivia just finished up kindergarten, and Oden will be FOUR in September.  They are doing great, I'm just so proud of them for taking this all in stride too.  :)

So to end here is a recent picture of me (in the middle!) from a recent girls-night-out with some awesome friends who have supported me through all this.  I hope they don't mind being posted!  I figure I should show off my chemo curls.