Great news!

I'm so happy - today I had my annual CT scans and they came back clear! I don't have to have another one for 12 months - unless of course something else shows up. I was reasonably confident that nothing would show up, but of course I was feeling fine when I was first diagnosed so that isn't really an accurate measure!!

My haematologist is still talking about trying for a stem cell collection. But remembering that we were never able to collect stem cells when I was in hospital, he wants to wait for some new drug(s) that assist in the production of stem cells for harvesting to be available on a trial here in Australia that I should be able to access. I don't know if/when we'd go for an autologous stemcell transplant - he told me that he has some MCL patients that had chemo followed by an auto SCT, and others that didn't have the transplant, and both groups are doing equally as well. But he agreed it would be a good thing to have 'in our back pockets' if it was possible.

The other good news is that he'd ordered a fairly full blood test, partly to test my immunoglobulin levels. I've been on monthly IV-IG infusions for about 7 months now, and they are definitely showing an improvement. As I said to him - I was pretty convinced they were improving because it is now over 6 weeks since I've had a chest infection needing me to go onto antibiotics. All this year, the previous gap between antibiotics has been around 10-12 days at most! He repeated that with IV-IG infusions, they start to kick in around the 6 months mark, and it isn't till around the 12 months mark that the full effect is felt.

This is some of the results:

igG - 5.7 (g/L) (normal range = 6.6 - 14.9)
igA - 0.8 (g/L) (normal 0.7 - 3.6)
igM - 0.3 (g/L) (normal 0.4 - 1.6)

Haemoglobin - 120 g/L
Platelets - 123
WCC - 5.4
Neutrophils 3.3

All good! Well, Platelets are slightly reduced but nothing to worry about. And they did some 'cell surface marker analysis' and he said very few B cells showed up, and NO mantle cells. Which is a very good thing!!!