All Quiet on the CML Front

With three months between appointments, I feel like I don't have much to report on the CML front, but I suppose what I mean is that without blood tests, I don't have any validation or confirmation.  Every couple of days I lay down on the bed, and do a spleen "self exam".  I look down to see if I'm looking crooked - if one side is larger than the other, and I palpitate the area below my left rib-cage to verify that there is no swelling.  A little tenderness, but nothing else noticeable.

As I've mentioned before I start to freak out a little when I haven't seen my doctor in awhile, and start to imagine that I'm falling apart at the seams, and no one is noticing.  Have a become a hypochondriac?  Maybe a little bit.  So, I'm maybe not falling apart.  I'm maybe holding it together, but my side effects have been persistent.  The fatigue is the worst of it.  I'm sleeping 9 plus hours a night, and still feeling exhausted.  With nine hours of sleep and nine hours of work, I'm feeling like all I do is work and sleep, and I take advantage of the weekends to do a little more sleeping.  It makes me feel guilty, and depressed.  Also depressing is the consistent weight gain.  Just over twenty pounds in almost ten months.  I work out 40 minutes, five days a week, and still the scale keeps creeping up.  The fact that I feel like I'm trying to tame my voracious hunger all of the time is most likely the main contributing factor to my expanding waistline - which is hard to acknowledge, and much easier to blame on my medication or my cancer, than take responsibility for, myself.  Damn gleevec, making me fat.

I know that I attach a lot of importance to my weight, and monitor it probably more closely than I should, but it's because it has been a problem issue for me in the past.  At 22 years old, I weighed over 250 pounds...and I'm pretty vehement that I never will again.  Understandably, when the scale starts creeping up, my anxiety level rises with it.

Besides the constant fatigue and fat-everything McGee, I get crippling foot cramping and frequent mouth sores.  The muscle cramps happen multiple times weekly - so much so - that they've sort of become a "normal" nuisance.  The mouth sores come on about twice a month, (just super deep and painful canker sores, nothing more unusual than that) and stick around for almost two weeks.

Blood draw tomorrow, and test results next Friday, February 6th.  They are again testing my BCR-ABL (the protein that triggers the cancer cell production) which was at 6.88 on 10/31/14.  Considering that since almost the beginning of this whole "cancer thing" my appointments have garnered little but good news, I should be able to let my guard down a little, and be more optimistic...and yet...once again...fingers crossed.