Without the Whitecoat
CML... Chronic Myeloid Leukemia
Dealing with leukemia in the family may affect a lot of family members. Seemingly, trying to understand what it is and how to care for it will make life much more bearable for each member of the family. However I always believe that care for individuals afflicted by any kind of illness or ailments should involve the entire family.
CML is also called Chronic Granulocytic Leukemia. Simply it means there are just too many white blood cells (they fight infection) in the spongy bone marrow. Its other counterpart is the red blood cells that carry oxygen and other materials to all tissues of the body and platelets which clot the blood. It is the genetic material in CML that was found to have an abnormality they called it the "Philadelphia Chromosone (Ph1)".
Leukemia is known to be in acute form when we see a lot of immature blast or cells, and become in the chronic form when progressing slowly with more mature looking cancer cells and is seen in patients who are middle-age or older patients, but can also occur in children. Remember that in the first stages of CML most of the population of patients won't have any symptoms of the cancer. Symptoms like a lingering tireness should prompt the patient to see his/her family physician. Other signs and symptoms that you should watch out for are night sweats, fever, feeling of not being energized (low batt), no appetite or don't feel hungry, and most of the time a swollen spleen (located in the upper quadrant of the abdomen on the left side, it makes other types of white blood cells and serves as a filter for old blood cells from the circulating blood.)\
Your family physician may order a laboratory examination for blood to test the number of each kind of different kinds of blood cells, if the result is not normal your physician may request for more diagnostic procedures, and finally will request for a more bone marrow biopsy, then by that time your physician can tell you what type of leukemia you have and what is the best plan of treatment.
Staging is needed to see if the leukemia cells have spread into the different parts of the body and it will dictate what kind of treatment can be rendered. In CML this are the stages that we will encounter, the chronic phase can be seen when there is a small number of blast cells (immature) in the blood and bone marrow, this may present without any symptoms. If there are a lot of immature or blast cells in the blood and bone marrow with a few number of normal cells, this is now the accelerated phase of CML. When 30% of the bone marrow and blood is composed of blast cells this is called the blast phase or also known as the "blast crisis" phase. This phase may have blast cells that will form tumors outside the bone marrow in areas like the lymph nodes. (bean-shaped structure, they stored the infection fighting cells). The Refractory phase is when leukemia cells do not lower even though treatment is given.
Is there any treatment for CML? So far we can list down three modalities in the treatment of CML, chemotherapy is when drugs that kills the cancer cells is used, radiation therapy when a high dose of x-rays or high energy rays will kill the cancer cells, and lastly bone marrow transplantation where the bone marrow is replaced with a healthy marrow after killing the cancer cells. Surgical interventions are utilized to relieve symptoms and in some clinical trials in which they utilize biological therapy (using the body's immune system to fight the cancer) to fight the cancer cells.
Chemotherapy is the systemic treatment, is either taken as a pill or having a needle in the vein or in the muscle where drugs and medication is given. Chemotherapy will try to kill all the cancers cells in the body utilizing the blood stream.