Nearing the end of the first big step

Today's a big day. This morning they hung the final bag of my 7+3 chemo regimen. Unfortunately, each bag is a little more than 24 hours, so I won't be done till sometime tomorrow afternoon, but there is an end in sight!

Counts still dropping:
Total WBC 0.2
HGB 6.9 (after blood)
Platelets 19K

So moving the right direction, and I need more blood today.
I got a triple infusion machine to be able to do chemo, antibiotics and blood all at the same time! :)

The plan now is to let the chemo do its thing. It will hang out in my body and for the next week work at destroying my current diseased bone marrow. In a week, they will check the bone marrow and if there's zero blasts in it, we'll consider that a success and I'll be able to let my normal blood cells repopulate my marrow and blood, and take a break till we give it another hit in a month. That, to me, is totally doable.

Unfortunately today as I thought about what *should* happen and what I *hope* will happen, I went to the other side, which is "it might not work this first time." The good news is that there is a way to determine if it was not effective and there is a treatment protocol to do something if it did not. And that's going to improve the ultimate goal of achieving minimal residual disease. Here's a great handout on MRD in blood cancers, although I'm not sure why it doesn't include AML specifically. I *think* using MRD for AML is still evolving, so maybe that's why it's only in PubMed and not on the general L&LS or ACS pages.

At any rate, I obviously would love a complete response this first time through, which might actually allow me to go home for Xmas. So if you would like something to do over the next week, I invite you join me in visualizing the chemo trashing the shit out of my bone marrow. You can do it however you want. Here's an image of blood entering bone marrow, and the chemo is in my blood, so that can work:

You can imagine the chemo clearing everything that shouldn't be there in the blood throughout the body, including the bone marrow, and flushing it out of my body/kidneys (maybe a teenaged boy visual...)

Or you can make up a cartoon or imagery that helps you imagine what's happening.

Lots of people use pac-man visuals for chemo, gobbling up cancerous cells

You can imagine a warrior or a boxer or any number of violent cultural references.

Or you can use what I used to get through breast cancer chemo: Buffy the Vampire Slayer staking. I especially like this one because it's not just Buffy, but all those who love her fighting off the bad stuff. Also, when she stakes, the vampires go up into dust, which is just an awesome visual, I think.

If you think of another one, or had your own chemo visual during treatment, let me know!

Here's to completion of the first phase. Thank you all for following along.