Well, knock me over with a feather. I was very curious to see how I had fared during a recent 3 week holiday from my Sprycel in order to have surgery (my choice), and hoping the PCR taken a few days before I restarted would not be so bad. My oncologist emailed me I was undetectable! I guess I had been inching up on it - the last two or three PCRs had only found the baddies in one of the two halves of the sample, and I've been MMR or below for about 4 years. But still, this was completely unexpected, especially with three weeks off meds. Of interest to some might be that all the stuff that is "normally" suppressed on TKIs - RBC, hematocrit, hemoglobin, platelets - all came up to normal after those three weeks. The creatinine remained elevated, unfortunately, and - alas! - the puffy eyes did not go away this time. So, as befitting a turtle, I have permanent turtle eyes, I guess. Just had my hearing test, though, and I have not lost any more ground, even though it seemed to me that I had. All in all, a really good couple of days! Yay, Team Turtle!
Here's something spooky: the dates of diagnosis and PCRU are completely symmetrical. It was July 20, 2009 when my husband and I held hands in my ex-oncologist's office as he went through his CML tutorial and showed us my little wiggly shadowy chromosomes in xerox form. And it was July 20, 2015 when the blood was drawn for the PCR that turned out to show that blessed word: undetectable. What a long strange trip it's been.
