All is well

In case you missed it ...

My doctors have given me a clean bill of health. Praise God! Thank you, Lord!

I already gave the news in the "James at 5:16" post below, but I realize now that the headline is a little vague and I buried the lede. Mea culpa. There's never a copy editor around when you need one.

The paint can results are in now as well, and everything came out fine there, too, so to speak.

(By the way, I'd love to see some comments on these posts. You don't have to sign in or join up to leave a comment. Just use the "Name/URL" option under Comments and write in any name you like. I'd like it best if I knew who you were, though. And while you're at it, feel free to click on any of the links you see on the site. They're risk-free, I promise.)

James at 5:16

"Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed. The prayer of the righteous person is powerful and effective." -- James 5:16

My hematologist told me today that my bone marrow biopsy and related blood work showed no sign of cancer, no sign of myelodysplasia, no sign of developing leukemia or lymphoma. They also did a chromosomal study to see if there are any genetic precursors of cancer or other diseases, and there are none.

I got nothin'.

Give God praise for his exceeding grace and mercy, and while you're at it give yourself a pat on the back for sending up some powerful and effective prayer. I thank you from the bottom of my heart and the depths of my spirit.

For a person my age, the makeup of the bone marrow should be roughly 50 percent marrow cells of various types and 50 percent fat. Mine is more like 30-70, but Dr. Jay says that's nothing to be concerned about. The low lymphocyte numbers we've been seeing could have been caused by exposure to some unknown toxin sometime in my past, or I might simply be made that way, she said. Either way, it doesn't seem to be a problem.

The vitamin D deficiency noted in my previous post could indeed be the culprit in my weight loss, but it is not related to the white cells; it's just a coincidence that it happened at the same time, she said. Dr. Jay at first suggested I add a vitamin D supplement to my diet, but backed off that idea when she learned I have a history of kidney stones. She said she would get back to me with a plan for addressing that problem.

Just eat a healthy diet and exercise, she said. See you in three months.

Again, I thank each of you for your love and prayers and support during this worrisome time. I can now exhale and get on with my life, more determined than ever to redeem the time.

What's D problem?

My primary care doctor's office left me a message yesterday to inform me that my most recent blood test showed a vitamin D deficiency.

This could explain my weight loss; one of my sisters lost a frightening amount of weight several years ago, and it turned out to be a vitamin D issue. She's fine now, thank God.

Whether this could account for my missing white cells remains to be seen Monday, when I return to the hematologist for the results of my bone-marrow excavation.

Well, that sucked

On Wednesday I had my bone-marrow biopsy. Do not try this at home. When I showed up at Dr. Jaye's office, the nurse, Pamela, who took my blood asked me if I had someone to drive me home. I did not, as no one had told us what a mess I would be at the conclusion of the procedure. "I don't know if you'll need a sedative or not," Pamela said. "I've never had a bone marrow, so I don't know how painful it is." Oh well, no worries, said I. I'll just tough it out and it will be fine. Ha.

I was told to lie prone on a table and informed that

I "have a good butt for bone marrow."

Why thank you! You really know how to make a guy feel special.

A woman named Maria came in and made small talk for a while before shooting my lower back and left gluteus full of numbing agent. "I'm putting lidocaine in here just like your dentist uses," she told me. "My dentist never works down there," I told her.

The procedure progressed pretty well, with just a couple of painful jolts like a Taser being applied to my pelvis. See, the problem with lidocaine is that the practitioner can't see where it's working and where it isn't, so she just has to start poking and hope for the best. Eventually everything was comfortably numb and Maria inserted the big needle (reportedly the size of a ten-penny nail, which I never saw -- intentionally on their part, I'm sure). She had to puncture the top of the pelvis bone and go into its spongy marrow. "This is going to be a very unusual feeling," she warned me before beginning the next phase, wherein she wiggled the needle around for a while to dislodge some marrow so she could extract it. "'Unusual,'" I said. "Good word. I must admit that is an 'unusual' feeling for me." Maria, a rather tall woman, was standing on a stool next to the table and leaning over me for added leverage, literally reaming me a new hole. I could feel the pressure all the way through to the front.

Just as Maria was finishing up that part and the procedure as a whole, I started to get dizzy and told her so. She leaned over to look at my face and saw that I was turning bright red. She told someone to go get a cold, wet towel and put it on my neck while Maria pulled out the needle and applied a bandage to the wound.

The towel didn't help. I felt close to passing out, so they rolled me over and put another towel over my whole head. My blood pressure clocked in at 148 over 110, which is sky-high for Mr. Mellow with the 90 over 64 baseline. They gave me a sip of apple juice, which I choked on.
Then it got really interesting when my abdominal and throat muscles started convulsing. A nurse named Connie tried to call my lovely wife (MLW) but had trouble figuring out how to use the speed-dial function on my cell, and I couldn't help much because my vocal cords were seizing. When she did figure it out, she couldn't get an answer because it was the one day MLW chose to sleep in.

Maria had the nurses give me IV fluids and left me alone in the room as the convulsions continued. I was pretty scared at this point and was praying, "O God, I don't want to die the way my father did.

"I don't mind coming home to you, but please, Lord, not like this."

Then I just started thanking him over and over again and telling him how much I love him. A peace came over me and the convulsions eased, thanks to the Holy Spirit and saline solution.
My phone rang on the stand next to my table, and I answered it. It was MLW. She thought I had been calling earlier just to say I was done, but realized from my strained voice that something was wrong. I told her I needed her to find a way to get to the hospital and drive me home. She caught our next-door neighbor Marg just as she was leaving for work. By the time MLW got to the hospital, I had been moved to the chemo room and was pretty much back to normal. (Insert wisecrack here.)

We ran into Pamela, the blood-drawing nurse, on the way out. "By the way," I told her, "the next time you have a patient come in for a bone marrow, give the sedative, and make sure they have a ride home. It hurts -- a lot -- and bad things happen."