Monday, February 15, 2010

MDS Becomes AML - T-Day

Today's the day. At noon, we meet with Dr. Transplant in hopes of coming away with some idea of how we're going to proceed. I confess this is generating some tension for me. I've conjectured a lot about what I think will happen—getting on with the procedure in short order if my brother is a bone marrow match; or waiting weeks or months til a match is found—but that's just me conjecturing.

What I need right about now is answers.

Back in Psych 101, I believe this would've been classified as an approach-avoidance situation. It's nothing I want to do, but it's something I want to get done as soon as possible.

When I visualize more time in the hospital, being rendered exhausted and useless with multiple IV tubes stuck into me, with pre-surgery vulnerability to infection and post-surgery vulnerability to rejection of the new bone marrow, I cringe.

When I visualize myself completely healthy, playing golf, skiing, riding mountain bike and traveling again to spots around the world, I smile.

The trick, obviously, is to keep the keep the ultimate, positive goal in sight, and to ignore the trauma required to get there. When the IV is connected, the chemo injected and the radiation generated, I'll just deal with it. Because strolling that golf course, or flying again to Paris are worth whatever it takes.

So, noon is the witching hour. (Depending on how long we have to sit around the waiting room waiting.) Let's just hope we come away with some answers, not just more conjecture and questions.

1 comment:

  1. I'm sorry you are going through this. There are no easy answers, as you know.

    However, you will have an opportunity to get a transplant whether your brother is a donor match or not. As you've mentioned, a search of the national registry can be done, and since you are Caucasian, a match (or two or three) is likely.

    The other possibility is a cord blood transplant. I'm sure you've read up on them. They are getting safer and safer all of the time. One advantage is that the stem cells are nice and young and healthy. There is no damage to the cells caused by age. And there is generally no diseases to pass along to you, which is not the case with adult donors.

    In the next five or ten years, transplants are going to be very safe. Ex-vivo stem cell expansion is going great guns, and they now can rescue mice and rats with a single stem cell, expanded outside of the body to a few dozen cells or so, and then transplanted in to sad mice and rats whose marrow has been purposely destroyed.

    I know that won't help you or me, since that's years away, but it is some comfort to know that they are learning more about transplants every day.

    The ultimate to me is to take stem cells from fat from your own body and grow them outside of the body. There would be no graft-versus-host disease then.

    In any case, good luck to you and just know the process takes some time.

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