My parents were wed on this day in 1936 and two years and a few days later there I was. Time to review the Wiki page on MCL and see what I am repressing.
1. It is rare, we’ve established that.
2. 5-yr survival rate is 50% (generally) and 70% (early stage). The latter is hopeful. Insofar as I remember my grandfathers all lived to their mid-to-late 70s. Right now, I’ll bargain for that.
3. Diagnosis: frequent involvement of GI tract (that’s me) and marrow (uh oh: don’t yet know if that’s me).
3. Prognosis is problematic since most individuals present with late stage MCL (perhaps not me). Accordingly, staging is not too informative since malignant B cells can travel freely thru the lymphatic system. This means that most cases start with a III or IV stage diagnosis. Not good.
4. There are a variety of cell types that they scrutinize that may relate to survivability. Ergo the most recent blood draw.
a. Blastic or blastoid. These babies aren’t good. They are big cancer cells and tend to indicate aggressiveness
b. low Ki-67 (?) Relates to higher survival rates
c. LDH (?) Which is released because of tumor build up or cell breakdown. Pretty sure that AbJ mentioned this as a part of the new assay. (Yep and my results are normal!)
d. As yet there is no agreed upon treatment. Very bad news. I worry about docs flying by the seats of their pants.
Enough. I cannot process any more at this time.
As if you need a reminder, in my book I quote Fantino as well as Stephen J. Gould in situations with bleak cancer prognoses where they each had to stop and remind themselves about Gaussian distributions, that there are people way out on the right hand tail re: survival, etc. I'm going to assume the median is the median is the median and in your case you are way the hell out to the right.
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