What Road to Take

I took this pict in New Orleans while riding in the car.

Drive

If all of our blood vessels both large and small were stretched out like a road they would make up 60,000 thousand miles of driving.

This helps explain why treatments take so long to work sometimes and why it’s difficult to control a disease like Behcet’s that affects the small blood vessels. The treatments have to travel a long way in order to cover every inch and area of the body. So the possibility of running out of gas is highly likely. But what if there’s something else my rhematologist is missing with this particular disease, what if they have turned down the wrong road?

One day my rhematologist explained to me that the treatments are like a dam in our body to hold back inflammation from flowing into the body. The key word here is INFLAMMATION. If he can control 80% of the inflammation from getting into my body it could help to eventually put this disease into remission…so he thinks! This is a great analogue in explaining what he is trying to accomplish with the treatments I’m getting and how a connective tissue disease works on the inside of the body but just not sure it could be the right one for me.

My thoughts about this are, what if it’s not all inflammation controlling this particular disease and that’s why it's difficult to control? What if it’s another variable that they need to control in order to put this disease away and the inflammation is only one road to getting to the end but we've missed a couple of roads prior?

Because they don’t know what fuels this disease, it’s very difficult to know what could put the disease out. Of course many illnesses such as cancer, viruses and inflammatory processes, happen on the B-cell. If you view the B-cell as one of the 60,000 thousand miles of blood vessels you then get the picture of why it’s difficult to know what road to turn down.

Good news is, we are now traveling on the B-cell road. But there are no guarantees that this is the right key to start the car, the right avenue to turn down or enough gas to make the journey.

When they pulled blood work to check for antibodies (my stamina) against my new Rituxan treatment, they did an Inmmunoglobulins blood test. Immunoglobuins have many small avenues inside this particular cell; IGA, IGM, IGG, IGE and IGD. My antibodies IGM were highly overactive, this is one of the biggest antibody cells. So by treating this particular cell, maybe we can make-up that mileage we lost going down a different road. Once on the right road we could possibly shut down the overactive highway, so that we can pass and put the car in neutral/idle in hopes that we can shift one more gear forward to park and remain there indefinitely. My rheumatologist has his work cut-out in finding how much of the gas (medicine) my body needs to make the journey, but since we now have this marker it could be a good landmark for his direction.

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