Tick – Tick – Tick

Clock is ticking. (get it?)

Today I had my (hopefully) final bone marrow biopsy.
Boy, it sure was a sight. Super-Oncologist Alison Loren, MD, MS, AWESOME, who, to be frank, weighs about a hundred pounds soaking wet, standing on a stool over yours truly with a biopsy needle (picture a turkey baster with a ten-penny nail on the end) digging through my pelvis bone for marrow to send to the lab. And yes, I wrote, digging.
I wish I could describe it in more detail but I was lying on my stomach on the exam table pretending it didn’t hurt. Bonnie could describe it better. She’s seen five of these now.
Five.
Five.
The first two were at Chestnut Hill Hospital. They did two because they couldn’t get any blood or marrow out of the bone the first time. In the middle of the procedure, the hematologist said, to his crowd of students, “you sometimes see this in leukemia patients.” This was the first time the word leukemia had been mentioned to us and it came out accidentally.
That’s some bomb to drop so casually.
Anyway, back to today’s biopsy.
Couldn’t sleep last night. Why? Well the test itself is no big deal, as dig-a-hole-in-your-bones tests go. But to put it academic terms, imagine a pass-fail final that you can’t study for. You pass, and you get your life back. You fail, and you have to repeat the class. And all the labs.
So now we wait for the results.
But wait, you say, you’re in remission! Yes, well there is remission and there is REMISSION.
If you were to examine my blood under a microscope right now you would find no evidence of leukemia. The treatment has worked. But the underlying cause of the disease is some damaged RNA inside two chromosomes in my cells. If the RNA have been corrected by the chemotherapy, they will no longer reproduce cells with damaged chromosomes and I will stay in remission, theoretically, forever. If the RNA is not corrected, they could, at any time begin to reproduce the damaged chromosomes and eventually allow the leukemia to return.
That’s not going to happen. You know it. I know it. But we have to prove it to medical science.
So right now my bone marrow is being sent to a specialized lab where they will examine my cells down to the molecular level and begin counting the millions of chemical combinations that make up the RNA of a bone marrow cell.
Forget what you’ve seen on CSI:Miami. It takes five working days.
Five working days.

Tick-tick-tick…