No marrow match for me.

Hi Guys,

We're back in Colorado after spending about 9 days in the Dallas area with Jen and Dan and the new kiddo; a cute one she is. Jen was able to get out of the hospital in about 36 hours after her surgery with Dan pushing for an early discharge. She's doing great.

While I was gone, did any of you get any weird messages, allegedly from us? Last Friday we got a strange message from a JNorman@aol.com stating simply:

This is a new game it is my first effort you are the first I trust you would approve.

Within minutes of the time that message was sent out we received messages from a bunch of servers handling e-mails saying our message had a virus and was being quarantined, or that they could not find the address of the recipient.

We, of course, were not here and our computer was not on. We sent out nothing. Did someone steal our e-mail address somehow and send out a virus in our name?

I downloaded all the new updates from Norton and scanned the entire C drive but nothing showed up as a virus. Did any of you get anything strange from our address?

Well, the marrow match failed me! Each of my siblings has a match, but not poor old me. Well, at least now I don't have to make that horrible decision about trying the transplant with a 25% mortality!

The antigen numbers: I'll likely get the count in the next few days after I go back to work, but they have to be 0, 6 or 12. Can't be any more than 12, since no one matched me, and it has to be an even number since there were two sets of matches. What were the numbers Diane and Jen picked? Uh, everybody paid up?

Before the failed match, my options were the transplant, watchful waiting for now, or chemotherapy. Brian, in a voice mail telling me about the non-match, mentioned combination chemo with the new monoclonal antibody drug, Rituxan. I need to look up the morbidity/mortality numbers on this, as it's pretty much cutting edge stuff, but the early numbers look great. I just want to try to make sure that the "cure"won't hasten my demise! They've been studying the stuff in combination with some newer chemotherapeutic drugs at M. D. Anderson and Walter Reed. Only eight people world-wide have died of Rituxan therapy alone,out of 100,000 folks. Those numbers don't look too bad. My next meeting with Brian will be on the 16th. I'll keep you updated.I think that's all for now.

Later,

Dave