ASH Abstracts

Ten days. I think this is the longest I've gone between blog posts since I started writing it.

Unfortunately, it's because my Dad died last week. He was diagnosed with lung cancer over the summer, and he'd been in hospice care for about 5 weeks. (Everyone wants to know if he smoked, and he did, but he quit over 25 years ago when his first grandchild was born.)

So the last 10 days or so have been taken up by family obligations, making up work that I've missed, and then just not really feeling like writing about cancer.

The good news (and you know I'm all about good news) is that the ASH abstracts came out on Wednesday.

ASH is the American Society of Hematology, the major organization for doctors who specialize in blood diseases, including lymphoma.

The abstracts are the short descriptions of the different sessions for their conference, which will be held at the beginning of December. Doctors who will go to the conference can read the short summaries and then decide which lectures or presentations to attend.

Every year at this time, I like to go through the abstracts for Follicular Lymphoma (there are 249 of them this year) and write about the ones that look interesting to me.

From what I can tell, there aren't really any big "blockbuster" presentations about FL this year, though I could be missing something. There will be some chatter in the next few weeks about ASH, and I'll keep an eye out for anything that people seem to be excited about. I'll also look out for the ones that won't get as much attention, but that I think are important, like research about Quality of Life and how drinking scotch will help you if you have FL.

(I didn't think there would really be anything about the benefits of scotch being presented at ASH, but I searched for it anyway. Nothing. And nothing for bourbon, either.)

So I'll pass along any interesting new research that I come across in the next couple of weeks.

(And thanks to Shelly, for checking in on me when I hadn't posted in a week, to make sure I was OK.)