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September 17, 2004 DAY #318

Friends,

Finally, after all these months. A disappointing day at the doctor's office! Nothing real serious, fortunately. The doctor was still pretty upbeat, but I wasn't very entertaining. The nurse came and sat with me in the waiting room and abused me for a while. That was fun. There was some good news too. My shingles are scabbing over, so I have to be careful not to scratch it to avoid infection. There is still some pain from the neuroglia. It feels like a perpetual side ache on the inside and a mild sunburn on the outside. The doctor insisted that I take some pain medicine to help ensure that the problem does not become chronic. I was hoping that I would be off all medications today, but the doctor wants to wait a bit longer. RATS! My blood counts are OK. I have included the last lab for two weeks ago and today down below. It appears that my white count is fine. It recovered nicely. It looks like I have graduated to once a month appointments now! The bad news is that my creatinine has gone way up again. This means kidney damage. The blood chemistry was not available at my last checkup, so we didn't know it at the time. It was at 1.5 then. Two weeks ago, my creatinine was at 1.6. The blood chemistry from today hadn't come in yet when I saw the doctor. He will look at it over the weekend or on Monday. If it is still over 1.5 he will arrange a workup from a nephrologist. After he sees my chemistry panel he might take me off the mepron and vfend.

Since I went back to work full time, I have gotten shingles and have been pretty tired and run down. All symptoms of stress. The doctor said he would support me going back onto disability part time. We will have to wait and see how that turns out.

Menchie and I will be going for a nice long bike ride tomorrow morning. We are still doing a lot of volunteering and working and training, so we are really busy. The Light the Night Walk is coming up in a couple of weeks, so I need to get all the donations turned in. Please send in your donations and sign up if you are going to. We would really like everyone on the team to wear a team polo shirt, so we hope everyone will buy one of those too. The walk should be really wonderful, so we encourage everyone to come on down to the track at Del Mar on Saturday, October 2! Come in the Solana gate after 4:00pm and parking is freeeeee! I will send more details on that later.

On the Medical Front, the tingling buzz part of my neuropathy seems to be going away. It is mostly just numbness and pain now. As I said above, the shingles are healing and the residual pain is like a side ache and a mild sunburn on the right side of my abdominal area just above the belt. I will be taking Vicadin for the pain at night. The doctor thought my shingles were interesting because it appears that it is affecting two nerve bundles instead of the usual one. Fortunately we caught it early and were able to contain it pretty well. RBC and HGB are fluctuating, but are higher today than ever. WBC was up last time and down again today, but this is pretty normal. They are probably busy today, and didn't have time to go to the lab. Creatinine was 1.6 last time as I said earlier. This is not good. The doctor said that it was probably easily curable with some kind of medication, if necessary.

Lab Results

Blood Cell Type

Normal Low

7/29

8/14

9/2

9/17

WBC 4.5 3.6 3.3 5.7 3.8
RBC 4.20 3.90 4.47 4.14 4.52
HGB 13.0 12.6 14.2 13.1 14.3
PLT 130 195 202 200 211

The last couple of weeks have been a struggle, but sharing with all of you makes me feel better as always! Keep on keepin' on! And be sure to join us Tuesday night at the Point Loma SoupPlantation!

Ted

tw@wilcoxent.com

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