Bad News

Thursday 16 February

This morning Lara and I went to the hospital for a checkup with Lara’s treating hematologist. A blood test was taken soon after we arrived. The results were not encouraging, she said straight out. All major values were way too low, a trend that had started a month earlier, blood platelets first. None the less, a bone marrow puncture on 16 January had shown no irregular cells, leaving her in 100% remission. So that was still good news, but the dropping values remained à suivre. Two weeks later, platelets had dropped further, to 88, while the desirable lower range is 150; reason why a new puncture was scheduled for today. This morning’s blood test results made a puncture all the more imperative. The doctor wanted to see what was going on and especially if the familiar pattern of dropping blood values pointed at a relapse of the leukemia, as it is known to often do.

Was there a more benign explanation for what she saw, we wanted to know? About three months ago, we reminded, Lara caught a tenacious flu from a careless physical therapist, who was practically coughing in her face; it took her a month to get over it, only to make room for two successive colds, the last one contracted from a different physical therapist. (Lara now stopped going to any of them.) She was still coughing from it as the doctor examined her this morning.

The doctor conceded that the values might have been repressed by a series of viral infections Lara has been battling since end November. She sounded hardly convinced, though, of that line of reasoning, clearly stating she had her own soupçons. Still we clung to it as the worst possible explanation was hard to absorb at that point.

It all boils down to the question if the bone marrow shows any bad cells, said the doctor as she was about to do the puncture. That is where we left it before exiting the hospital. Tonight, said the doctor, I will call you with an answer to that question as soon as the microscopic cell test results come back from the lab. We will take it from there, she intimated. Even so, the three of us discussed about the possibility of resuming chemotherapy.

Then, at around seven o’clock in the evening, the call came. The disease had come back. It had evolved differently, the doctor said, but it was still AML. Therapy was to start early next week.

And so the cycle runs.