It’s good to see a relaxed looking Dr Inscrutable as we walk into the consulting room. He’s always calm but after 7 years we’ve learned to read the degrees of calm a bit. It’s only 6 weeks since the last appointment so we don’t quite know what to expect but we are hoping for ‘nice’ blood numbers. Doc confirms a drop in protein from 24 to 21 from the June to July results, with red cells up a bit from 137 to 142, platelets up from 295 to 314 and a normal white cell count of 7.7: “Everything is going slowly in the right direction.” It’s frustrating not to have a more up to date protein count but there’s always a time delay for those results so we need to wait until the next 6 week review.
We’re hoping to go on holiday so have been ringing travel insurers. That is a depressing and time-consuming occupation, with so many complicated questions. One which stumped us was whether the Waldenstrom’s was a transformation or development of the Splenic Marginal Zone Lymphoma or a separate issue.
Husband asks the doc if the WM developed from the SMZL or if it cropped up on its own. The doc’s reply rather stuns us. He tells us that the two are ‘overlapping conditions’ and that it’s difficult to differentiate between them. The he calmly drops what is for us a bombshell: Husband does not have and has never had SMZL. He has WM – it just initially behaved like SMZL so that’s what they thought it was. Apparently it was only when further tests were done before the last MDT, when they were discussing how best to treat Husband’s cancer, that they determined that it was WM. “He has Waldenstrom’s Macroglobulinemia. That’s what you tell the insurance company.” That makes a significant difference to insurers – they like things to be less complicated – and we think it’s good news for us. But we don’t yet know.
So we leave feeling reprieved, at least for 6 weeks until the next appointment, but rather dazed.
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