My Dad Was Just Diagonized

My dad is 79 and was just diagonized with CLL and I am sick to my stomach. I live in Florida and he lives in NYC and I wish as an only child I could drop everything and go be with him. My mom is elderly too and she is the only person with him. He is getting ready to do 4 CT Scans. He believes his lymph nodes are enlarged. Other than that he has no other symptoms that he can tell. He only found out something was wrong when he had a CBC and his white blood cells were higher than normal.

 

On 5/13/2007 Dolores2318 wrote:

My dad is 79 and was just diagonized with CLL and I am sick to my stomach. I live in Florida and he lives in NYC and I wish as an only child I could drop everything and go be with him. My mom is elderly too and she is the only person with him. He is getting ready to do 4 CT Scans. He believes his lymph nodes are enlarged. Other than that he has no other symptoms that he can tell. He only found out something was wrong when he had a CBC and his white blood cells were higher than normal.

Unless there are some very poor prognostic indicators, CLL is a very slow moving disease...  We have various lists you can join (ACOR, Yahoo) where some of the CLL patients have had CLL for more years than they can remember.   There are several treatment options available to CLL patients and most are extremely effective.  The most important thing to do after initial diagnosis is to find out the type of CLL he has, which is done through a battery of tests (FISH, ZAP-70, Flow Cytometry).  These tests will tell how aggressive the CLL may be.  55% of CLL patients do not have a very aggressive form of the disease.  It may be a long while (if ever) before you'll have to get concerned about your dad's situation.  Getting educated on this disease is the best thing a family member can do, given how slowly CLL will typicall progress (if it does at all).  Regards.

So sorry about your Dad.  The longer he can go without treatment the better.  Once treatment is started things are never the same. 

My husband was diagnosed with CLL in 1990 at the age of 60.  He did not have to start treatment for his CLL until 2001 at which time his white blood count was 160,000.  His oncologist did not think it necessary to start treatment earlier because he was still feeling okay but for night sweats and some tiredness.  My husband did not react well to the treatment (chemotherapy).  Many, many blood transfusions later and other drugs given to him to help him recover from the effects of the chemo, things just went downhill from there.  In 2005  he was diagnosed with four large brain tumors (cancer).  Consequently he had whole brain radiation five days a week for four weeks..  Fourteen months later tests showed two new brain tumors so then had the Gamma Knife procedure.  Less than four months later my husband passed away.  He was never able to do much of anything after the whole brain radiation.  The chemo treatments prior to that left him so tired he could not do anything even after having many shots of Procrit and Retuxin infusions.  I did everything in my power to try to build up my husbands immune system long before he started treatment and I attribute that to his sucess in living over sixteen years after having been diagnosed with CLL.  There are some good natural supplements out there to take for building up your immune system.  I suggest you get on the computer and do a lot of research on immune building supplements and also research any and all drugs that may be given.    My husbands treatment was more of his downfall than his diseases.