Husband being treated for follicular lymphoma

Ret4 said:

Thanks for the clarification

Thanks for the clarification Evarista! My husband is finally home from the hospital. No more antibiotics or fevers. Night sweats greatly reduced. Bone marrow biopsy had good initial result but still waiting for final result. (Something about chromosones?) WBC is still low so I'm keeping him in a bubble until his oncologist appointment on Wednesday. He has an appointment for new blood work today. They are thinking this is LON from the Rituxan.

Did you get any type of injections for your low WBC? They are talking about giving him something twice a week. Also, how long until you WBC returned to normal on it's own? Any info from your experience would be so apprectiated! 

I'm thinking maybe I'll start a new thread about Late Onset Neutropenia to see if there are others here who have experienced the same thing. Thanks again!

Hi Ret, been thinking about y'all.  So glad to hear that he is doing OK.  As I think I mentioned in my earlier thread on LON, it tends to go unrecognized because we mostly do not get our blood drawn every week and it typically resolves on it's own as long as one does not get sick (i.e., get an infection). It just comes and goes without anyone being the wiser.  Luckily for me, nothing untoward happened.  

We only discovered my LON because it coincided with my 4-week blood draw, at which point I was told to resume neutropenia precautions.  I may have dodged the infection-bullet because I was still staying very compulsive about hygeine and exposure to things that pose a risk to a neutropenic individual (unwashed fruits/veges, raw or rare meat/fish, large crowds, etc). My count was not low enough to warrant additional treatment with Neulasta, etc., but I think they did have me restart the Levoquin (antibiotic).  And of course, take precautions, which I stayed rather obsessive about for quite a while. Repeat labs two weeks later showed my counts rising, which is consistent with how LON is described in the literature. Another small rise two weeks after that.  They also did flow cytometry to check for evidence of circulating tumor cells and found none.

As for the relationship between LON and febrile neutropenia, I have not seen any literature relating the two.  My impression is that they are different beasts. For LON, most of the literature relates to folks with autoimmune disease, since Rituxan has a long history there. The good news, if you can call it that, is that the one very small prospective study that I found for lymphoma patients suggested a positive correlation between an episode of LON and long-term survival. I got little response on my earlier thread about LON because I think simple LON is generally missed by both patients and physicians unless something goes sideways.

Hope he continues to do better.