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Do you want a quick summary or all the gory details? The details, of course. Because, really, what’s better than listening to an acquaintance ramble on about their health issues?

So: My M-protein marker test—a good proxy for the level of cancerous bone marrow cells—is down from 0.72 last month to 0.63 this month. This is the right direction, but not the right magnitude. So we’re going to increase my Revlimid maintenance from 10 mg to 15 mg. This puts at me at a slightly higher risk of blood clots, which means that I will also be starting a daily baby aspirin regimen.

Blood clots aside, the main side effect of the Revlimid is that it weakens your immune system. This is measured primarily by looking at your neutrophil count. Yours is probably around 5000 or so. Mine is now down to 1800. Anything above 1000 is OK, but obviously this is getting close to worrisome. So now we’re doing a balancing act: we want to use the highest dose of Revlimid that still keeps me out of the immune system red zone. It will take several months to figure out what that is.

And speaking of this, it turns out that following the stem cell transplant I now have what’s effectively a baby immune system. This means that in a month or so I’ll start going through all the usual baby immunizations. Not all, actually, but a bunch. Fun.

On a positive note, apparently my bones are in good enough shape that I’ll be allowed to do strenuous stuff if my back fully recovers. So that’s something to look forward to. Assuming my back ever fully recovers, of course.

And finally, a test to see if my sister reads all the way to the end: I now have permission to clean the cat litter box. So you don’t need to come over tonight.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

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