Better Than Expected

When the 2004 Detroit Pistons made their surprising run to the NBA Finals, nobody gave them much of a chance against the star-studded Los Angeles Lakers. The Pistons were a gritty defensive team with no traditional superstar, and the Lakers were the very definition of a superteam with in-their-primes Shaq and Kobe, along with surefire Hall of Famers Gary Payton and Karl Malone. Most pundits were predicting the Lakers, who had won three of the past four championships, to sweep the series. And with game one being played in Los Angeles, it was widely assumed the Lakers would open the series with an easy win.

Instead, Detroit stunned the Lakers with an 87-75 victory, playing suffocating team defense and showing that they would not be intimidated. The Pistons would go on to win the series in a mere five games, ending the Shaq/Kobe era in LA, and forcing that jerk Karl Malone to retire without a ring.

Similarly, my leukemia diagnosis was intimidating when I first learned of it. In October of 2024, my white blood cell count (WBC) was at 77,000 per microliter. Your WBC is almost certainly in the normal range between 4,000 and 11,000 - so I was about 7 times the normal upper limit. 

Before I started treatment this past Tuesday, my WBC had risen to a staggering 254,000 (25x the normal upper limit), my lymph nodes were swollen all over my body due to accumulation of leukemia cells, and my healthy blood cells were having a hard time doing their jobs due to rush hour traffic everywhere in my blood stream. It was unclear how I’d respond to the obinutuzumab infusions and the pirtobrutinib pills - would I have a reaction that stops the infusion? Would the treatment work? Or would I have a resistant and biologically challenging disease?

Well, as you may have read yesterday, my body handled the infusions well, my lymph nodes are shrinking dramatically, and after just two days of treatment my WBC sits at 109,000. Yes, you read that correctly, more than half of my cancer is dead and gone after just 48 hours. The malignant superteam I initially feared is turning out to be just a bunch of washed up Karl Malones.

Go Pistons!!