I am speaking from experience here. I was diagnosed in August 2005 shortly after my 37th birthday. My white count was high, I was anemic and my spleen was pretty big (23cm) according to the docs. I went on 400 mgs of gleevec and within 2 weeks all was almost "normal" then the 3rd week came my white count and anc count "crashed". I was taken off the med until the counts recovered this took about 3 weeks then I went back on again and after a couple of weeks the same thing happened this went on for quiet some time on again and off again. In December I had been off the med for almost a month and was starting to go a little crazy(mentally) so he put me back on the med taking 400 mgs every other day. I did this up until 3 weeks ago. My counts were coming back up slowly and my platelets were up over a million so my local onc got nervous and called my Mayo doc which I was scheduled to go back and see just for a check up at the end of March anyways and they sent a kit for a blood draw so they could repeat a FISH test. Well, the FISH showed that my leukemia cells were at 20% up from 3.8%. I had to have another very very painful biopsy done. Mayo figured the increase was because of the med dosing. They don't think that I failed the med because I wasn't on the proper dose. So I am now back on 400 mgs every day and am in no way to stop taking that dose. If my anc gets to 500 or below I will then start the nuepogen (SP??) shots to try to bring the counts back up. Mayo said that I might just have to live with low counts, some people do. They also said that it is a very common problem. So I go every week for blood work and they keep a close eye on me. So right now I'm just "waiting" around to see what happens to make sure that I will respond to the med again which I'm pretty sure that I am because my platelets are almost in normal range again. Mayo said that was the thing to watch for. If they came down it means the med is working. So now that I've rambled on, in my opinion I would not reduce the dose because of what happened to me. Take care!
Sheila --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ [CMLHope] A support group of http://cmlhope.com ------------------------------------------------- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "CMLHope" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/CMLHope -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
