Week 9

Week 9 and I'm feeling fine.  Seriously, I feel like I'm 95% of the way back to normal.  I haven't caught any bugs for a while now with the exception of the cold I got a few weeks ago which isn't so bad, it just seems to be lingering.  I still get tired unexpectedly from time to time and when I eat I sometimes get bad indigestion which seems to be subsiding over time.

But the most encouraging thing is the blood results.  There is still a few things outside of the normal range but they all are consistently getting better with the exception of the neutrophils which are really low.  Almost non existent low.

However, the best result was from a test call C Reactive Protein (CRP).  CRP is a crude measurement of inflammation in the body.  It is limited though.  Although it will tell you if there is an inflammatory process happening in the body,  it cannot tell you where or how many locations the inflammation is occurring in.  So it could be caused by anything from certain types of cancer to a sprained ankle or a kidney stone.  The point is if your CRP is high you have an inflammatory process somewhere in your body.

Now my disease that I treated with my stem cell transplant is CIDP, standing for chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy.  The key word here being inflammatory.  So some one with CIDP should always have an elevated CRP.  Now back at the end of April my CRP was over 100 which is substantially elevated since normal is supposed to be between 0 and 5.  

Now post transplant the elevated reading could have been because of damage from the chemo or the neupogen shots, so that reading should probably be discarded.  But my last reading was 4!  Yes inside the normal range which means I currently do not have an inflammatory process happening in my body, including CIDP.  Well, that's it from me for now, until next time, stay well:)