Low neutrophils are a problem. My husband was in a Phase 1 trial for immunotherapy and they wouldn’t give him the meds if his neutrophil count was low. When it was borderline, the nurse used to tell my husband to walk up and down stairs for five minutes or so, it seemed this boosted the counts. I’m not saying you should try this, but we used to call them the “pesky Phils.” Chemo really did a number on my husband with the pesky Phil’s. He was for a whole week unable to start his deep-veined thrombosis injection (another side effect of his cancer) waiting for his white blood cell count to go up.

After the immunotherapy trial failed, my husband was in a second trial, for Selinexor. After that he was placed on another from of oral chemo. He would have lived a bit longer if aspiration pneumonia did not get him. It’s a tough road to walk but it did buy him time.

Hello,

Thanks for the valuable info. We have a 1 story house, no stairs to climb. If I want to walk in the street, can you guess how many minutes of walking I should do to be about equal to 5 minutes of climbing stairs?

I’m afraid I can’t tell. Maybe if you have a Fitbit or an exercise app on your watch/phone, you can do the comparison. I really have no clue. Sorry.

Do you have a Wii Fit or even one of those step-stool exercise things you can go up and down on to replicate stair climbing? Might be easier to exercise in the home than having to go outside if you aren't feeling well, depending on the weather in your area on any given day.

There are probably exercise calculators online that do calorie comparisons between exercises ... you aren't worried about the calories, of course, but if they say five minutes of jogging equals ten minutes of stairs, or something like that, at least it would give you some ideas to work with.