We went to St. Louis for a follow up Friday. We received the recommendation we expected to receive, but of course we’d wanted to hear something else. The Doctor recommended that I undergo an allogeneic transplant, which is a stem cell transplant from a donor other than me. I have many concerns about this transplant. It’s much more difficult on the body and recovery time would be several months and maybe a year or more. I’d have to spend 3 months in St. Louis and even after that, it’d be likely that I’d have complications that would end me back in the hospital.

There are two kinds of allogeneic transplants, relative donor and non-relative donor. The non-relative donor transplant has a very low percentage of success and a high percentage of complications. One of the complications is graft versus host disease where the new stem cells reject the existing cells in my body. This is possible with either type of transplant, but is more prevalent in non-relative transplants. There is always the possibility that the transplants won’t take, again a higher possibility in the non-relative transplant. Of course, if the transplant doesn’t work, then we pretty much wait for the cancer to win. If we don’t try the transplant, we treat what we can with chemo and radiation, and wait for the cancer to win.

At this time I’ve pretty much decided not to pursue the non-relative donor transplant. It would take a tremendous toll on my body and my quality of life would be miserable for months with a very low possibility of success. I’m still uncertain about the relative donor transplant. The relative donor transplant comes from a sibling. There are blood tests that would need to be collected and typed to see if there’s a match, and just because it’s a sibling there’s no guarantee, only about a 25% possibility of a match.

In the meantime, I’ll probably get some high dose chemo this week to try to get things under control; get an MRI on my hip to make sure radiation won’t damage anything going on in the hip; then hopefully start radiation to relieve the pain in my hip.

We obviously have some big decisions to make. My main concern is to have as good a quality of life as long as possible. That doesn’t seem very likely with either transplant option, but we’ll have to see. For now, I do all I can to get healthy and just keep fighting.