REMISSION!

From Luke's Face Book page yesterday "april 11, 2013 and i am in remission. forever in debt for the love and support i continue to receive from so many incredible folks, i wouldn't be where i am without it all. now i'm gonna keep up my end of the deal and keep kicking ass and keepin' on. LUCK FEUKEMIA. you guys rule."

Remission means they found no blast cells in the bone marrow they took Wednesday.  This is what Dr. Wells was hoping for and what we were praying for.  Luke still has a long way to go, but for now his bone marrow is producing good blood cells.

With leukemia being a blood borne cancer, the leukemia cells can be anywhere in his body.  Chemo may make him symptom free but the only way to know whether the chemo eradicated all of the cancer cells is the passage of time.  

Luke will continue with aggressive chemo over the next several weeks, after that we don’t know what the path forward will be.  After Luke went into remission the first time around the treatment protocol was +30 months of chemo.  With relapsing there is increased probability that chemo will not be entirely effective and the cancer will again return.   

Getting Luke into remission does make a bone marrow transplant more of a possibility.  Whether Luke will receive a transplant depends on a number of factors, but a major one is finding a compatible donor.  Luke met with the transplant team at MDA a couple of weeks ago   If Luke’s decides to go the transplant route he will leave the care of Dr. Wells and become the patient of the transplant team for 100 days. 

Early last week Luke was taken off the steroids cold turkey.  After going off the steroids Luke experienced severe joint pain.  Gayle took him to the ER Tuesday when the pain became unmanageable.  They were able to get the pain under control.  They started him on lower dose of steroids and are going to try to wean him off. 

Luke is off of chemo until next Wednesday.  Wednesday he will be admitted to MDA for five consecutive days of chemo.  During the stay he will also have surgery to remove his PICC line and give him a port.

Except for the joint pain Luke is doing well.  The new pair of studio monitors Luke invested in arrived this week.  Firing up the monitors seemed to have helped with pain mitigation!  Expect to see Luke at the blood and Be the Match donor registry drive Saturday.  

We’ll take the good news of this week and deal with whatever next week brings.  Luke and the Novick family appreciate everyone's thoughts and prayers.  

God bless