J. Michael Jones

I have a new podcast titled: Finding God the Hard Way; A Descartian Odyssey. You can find it here. Below is the update on my health and thanks so much for your interest.

Last Thursday I had my quarterly labs with two obvious concerns, the state of my renal failure and the state of my cancer.

Renal Function: I was very pleased to see that my eGFR (estimation of renal function) rose by 7 points in 90 days. That is unheard of. So, I went from 29 to 36. As a reminder, I started at 4 three years ago. I had some modest improvement along the way as about 1 point per 3-6 months. So, I am very pleased, especially considering there is usually no further improvement in renal function after the insult of Multiple Myeloma once you’ve reached the 6 month mark and I’m at the 3 year mark.

Cancer State: You can imagine, and some of you don’t have to imagine because you’ve had cancer, how much is riding on tests that tell you if your cancer is raging or in remission. Whether you have an immediate path of suffering and death, or one or relative normalcy. I have a large lab panel that looks at many things, but a pocket of tests (serum lambda and kappa light chains and ratio) which looks directly at my cancer. Most of the time I go to the lab the lab technician looks at the computer screen and the appearance on their face is like a deer in the headlights. As one technician explained, the new (very expensive EMR) is very confusing with old labs piling on top of new orders. So, each time I have to tell them which ones I need. Still, most of the time they omit the most important ones. This happened again last Thursday, even though I told her that my life depended upon getting the right tests done and told her which tests must be done. So, I’m still clueless if my cancer is raging or in submission. I’m heading back to the lab with new paper orders to see if they can get it right this time and the outcome hangs in suspense. I will update again when I know something.