Ken thank you for the education you just presented! I know now who to go to when I have questions. I want to live my life but often feel nervous being out especially during winter months. Thank you so much♥️

Agreed! Most of our life if we are lucky we run on automatic pilot. And then one day we don’t and have to fly by the seat of our pants.

And just to be clear B cells and T cells are also called lymphocytes. Lymphocytes are white blood cells (as opposed to red blood cells which if low in number is called anemia). I hope this helps. CLL patients generally have to learn a new vocabulary and it helps to understand the complex nature of what it can do to the body. In my case it allowed an autoimmune disease (when the lymphocytes can't recognize the difference between bad cells and good cells and attacks the good cells in you body) in my brain and caused all kinds of havoc which required very strong meds including steroids--that alone can lead to infections--to practically wipe out my immune system. And of course as luck would have it, soon after the treatment, which helped a lot, a pandemic called Covid came along. Good timing that, he says ironically.

(PS--there are certain vaccines-- live vaccines--that should never be used in immunocompromised patients).

Well, infections. Infections are live micro creatures that can be passed from person to person, sometimes animals/bugs to people, even non living things to people. Your immune system as well as other systems such as the friendly bacteria that live in your gut are responsible for protecting you from bad little buggers such as viruses and bad bacteria (e.g. Lymes Disease caused by Borelia bacteria carried by ticks); infections of the skin are common because staph lives on skin and an open wound may allow this fairly destructive germ into the bloodstream. Fungal infections such as Tinea and Candida are not uncommon. Invaders are first detected by T cells which inform B cells something is up and while the T cells can kill some invaders, the B cells in normal individuals gets busy developing antibodies that work to envelope and destroy infections. However, we CLL patients are not so lucky or should I say effective in this paradigm. High numbers of abnormal white blood cells which don't do very much to fight infection crowd out normal white blood cells. In addition, the communication and cooperation between T cells and B cells may be dysfunctional so they don't talk to eachother, which further reduces immunity to infection. If you ask your doctor, who may or may not have run a blood test to see what your immunoglobulin (antibody) status is (IgM, IgG, and IgA)--and I recommend that you do talk to your doctor--they will likely tell you that you are immunocompromised and should act accordingly by trying to avoid getting into dangerous situations particularly without protection such as masking and distancing in the case of influenza and Covid outbreaks; they will recommend treating any infection quickly with appropriate medications and to get vaccinated when appropriate even if vaccines require a working immune system to do their job, still there might be some protection afforded in certain individuals.THERE Susan is your explanation, finally--and you don't even need to pay a copay LOL..Having said all of this, please be sure to double check with your doctor, have specific questions in hand written down so you know what you want to ask him or her and good luck to you.