Halloween's a Comin'

Hi there,
I have recently obtained some procedural images for my CT/PET scan and port placement X-rays. The body is a pretty cool thing!!!  Remember my power port?  It worked swell for the first infusion, and the oncology nurses' faces light up when they see I have one.  It makes their job easy and clean, and it is very comfortable for all.  I have mine, because after the 6 months of chemotherapy, I will have 2 years of rituxan infusions every two months.  It made sense to have this entry way for at least 2.5 years of injections.  Here it is up close.  (see left side - the faint triangle, then the tube which goes much farther into my superior vena cava vein than I thought) 

Rituxan is expensive (as we've seen), but more importantly it is a "monoclonal antibody"!  It is considered a "targeted" cancer therapy.  Antibodies are an integral part of your body's immune system. Normally, your body will create antibodies in response to an antigen (such as a protein or a germ) that has entered the body.  The antibodies attach to this foreign antigen in order to mark it for destruction by the immune system.  

These monoclonal antibodies (that are created in the lab by wonderful cancer researchers) find the specific protein marker, in this case the CD20 antigen on my normal and malignant B-cell lymphocytes, and "mark" them, and then my natural immune system will kill them - all of them.  My stem cells - young cells in the bone marrow - where the lymphocytes (and all blood/lymph cells) are made, do not have the CD20 antigen, so they are not killed, and this allows healthy B-cells to regenerate after each infusion.  

Pretty cool, eh?  I am grateful there are people that figure this stuff out, and have made a drug to mark these nasty cells.