Day 7

My Oncologist gave me a great analogy for Leukemia so I figured I would do best to try and explain it here along with pictures. .

The normal bone marrow is like a healthy garden, full of all sorts of vegetables and making lots of different types of fruits like red blood cells, white blood cells, platelets, Neutrophils, and many other cells our bodies need.

Healthy bone marrow garden with a happy lady

Lots of healthy cells from the bone marrow

Then with Leukemia your bone marrow plants lots and lots of weeds which is the white blood cells that are mutated.  So the body cannot make enough of all the other cells it needs because all it is doing it pumping out messed up white blood cells.

Bone marrow making only white blood cells (but bad ones) and a happy Leukemia lady

The Chemotherapy will destroy the garden killing everything, all the good health plants and the bad weeds.  After they do this they want my garden to come back by itself to make a healthy garden.  They will kill the entire garden a few times to ensure there are no weeds anywhere that could grow again.

Bone Marrow after Chemo.  Nothing there but ready to grow

They will do a bone marrow biopsy at the end of the Chemo see look directly into the garden and see what is growing.  Hopefully this helps to illustrate the situation better. It has helped me understand all these crazy terms.

Quick update:

• Yesterday I gained 4 lbs!!  Crazy huh?  That is from the Chemo and all the liquids they are pumping into me 24 hours a day.  
• I will get two bags of blood today because I am very anemic since my red blood count is half what it should be for a male.  This should make me feel better.  Interesting to note, they had to kill all the white blood cells in the donor blood because I don't need anymore than I have.  Like killing all the weeds in the neighbors dirt before putting it in your garden.  Donating blood is so important!  Without it, I would be dead.  
• My white blood count is dropping, as it should because of the Chemo.  
• Platelets are dropping too, so in a few days I will get some fresh ones.   
• I feel ok, tired.  Taking lots of naps and walking as much as I can.