Thursday, February 5, 2009

Making Adjustments

Shooting along Market and Stockton after a morning at Kaiser.
Photo: ©2009 Anna L. Conti


This month is the one year mark for my Rituxin maintenance and time to make a decision.

I have to say Dr. Liu is great . He listens, he answers any and all questions and is very detail oriented. He appreciated the fact that Anna and I have done some research and know a bit of what we are talking about.

The three of us talked about what we had learned from the recent ASH and LLS conferences and agreed that since there are no hard conclusions regarding a practice of Rituxin maintenance we had several options, any of which Dr. Liu would be comfortable with. So I pretty much decided to reduce the frequency of infusions and will now be going in for Rituxin every three months rather than every two months. At the end of the year we will reassess.

My numbers are really good and holding. There are several new drugs and monoclonal antibodies in test and trial right now. There's a good chance I'll be able to deal with my CLL as a manageable for a good long time.