Today while in a meeting with my son's school (more on that recurring headache later) I had a call that went straight to voice mail. It was my local cancer center calling to remind me of my weekly phlebotomy which reminded me I haven't given everyone here a health update for a while.

To jog everyone's memories, I've been getting weekly phlebotomies, "feeding the vampires" as I called it, of 450 ml of blood since April or so due to an onset of polycythemia vera. We've been trying to get my red blood cell count down to 14 (whatever that number specifically means) and while I got it down from the 19s to the high 14s really quickly, by June, stress over the summer helped keep it spiking back up.

Well, by the end of September the number was consistently at or below the 14 border and my oncologist-hematologist has decided this is a good indicator that I had secondary polycythemia vera, which is the curable version of this blood cancer as opposed to the slow death version.

I now am no longer feeding the vampires and I have a 3 month date with my o-h/ologist to re-check my levels then and see if the supposition is right. Potentially great news.