At the risk of jinxing things, I think I can say I am seeing improvement.
Little by little the sinus infection seems to be losing its punch. I still can't hear much, but even so, I can see and feel the difference: less crud coming out, no runny nose, no fever the last two days (although it has been so cold that I still walk around the house all bundled up), very little coughing.
All of that has meant I am gradually gaining strength. In the mirror I still look like a cadaver, but one with no swollen lymph nodes and one who gained a couple pounds the past two days.
I even felt strong enough to take a drive last night in Nancy's car to go buy a new one for myself---seeing as how Farm Bureau "repossessed" my company car. Slightly insane, but I felt strong enough to do it.
The episode reminded me of the old Bert & I "Down East humor" stories. There is one story where an old geezer walks into town and chances to meet the undertaker. The undertaker quizzes him about his health and his age and concludes, "Virgil, you know? I think it hardly pays you to go back home." (It somehow loses its humor if I have to explain it.)
But, I thought, yeah, it pays me to buy this. I'm planning on lots of miles yet.
For that I have to thank the people at the National Institutes of Health. Not only did they hear my plea to immediately start on the clinical trial of PCI-32765 (which seems to be producing amazing results so far), but they correctly diagnosed my sinus infection and persistently followed up to get the antibiotic right.
In contrast, consider this: the coughing started in late September. Since then, locally, I had seen two GP doctors once each and one respiratory specialist twice, had two lung capacity tests and one chest x-ray, and not once did any of them consider that the problem was not in the lungs, but in the sinuses (despite the fact that sinus infections are common among CLL patients) with a post nasal drip causing the cough. Since September all of them had missed the fact that I had a specific kind of infection that causes pneumonia, the leading killer of CLL patients.
The people at NIH caught it on day 1.
Yeah, I owe them a lot.
