Bone Marrow Transplant Quotes

Her face crashes. She hasn't dealt with a single transfusion or lumbar puncture. She wasn't allowed near me for the bone-marrow transplant, but she could have been there for any number of diagnoses, and wasn't. Even her promises to visit more often have faded away with Christmas. It's her turn to taste some reality.

The cure for HIV?” “In 2007, a man named Timothy Ray Brown, known later as the Berlin patient, was cured of HIV. Brown was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia. His HIV-positive status complicated his treatment. During chemotherapy, he battled sepsis, and his physicians had to explore less traditional approaches. His hematologist, Dr. Gero Hutter, decided on a stem cell therapy: a full bone marrow transplant. Hutter actually passed over the matched bone marrow donor for a donor with a specific genetic mutation: CCR5-Delta 32. CCR5-Delta 32 makes cells immune to HIV.” “Incredible.” “Yes. At first, we thought the Delta 32 mutation must have arisen during the Black Death in Europe—about four to sixteen percent of Europeans have at least one copy. But we’ve traced it back further. We thought perhaps smallpox, but we’ve found Bronze Age DNA samples that carry it. The mutation’s origins are a mystery, but one thing is certain: the bone marrow transplant with CCR5-Delta 32 cured both Brown’s leukemia and HIV. After the transplant, he stopped taking his antiretrovirals and has never again tested positive for HIV.

You’re just living a normal life — never been sick, never been unhealthy, and all of a sudden you are fighting for your life. And this is happening to individuals every day,” Thomas said. The infection went to her blood stream and bone marrow and caused septic shock and organ failure. After undergoing multiple surgeries including a bone-marrow transplant and a “never-ending cycle of antibiotics,” she survived the ordeal.1​➔​ Thomas survived relatively intact. Some don’t, losing limbs in a desperate bid to stop the infection from spreading and then living permanently debilitated lives. Others aren’t even that “lucky.” Denis

In the Bone Marrow Transplant  Ward, it looked so different  that such thoughts seemed completely detached from reality. I thought about the nature of the ward and the medical staff employed there. It was a completely different world. I understood my comparison was unfair.

That first doctor’s visit was a chilling introduction to the world of bone marrow transplants. This particular doctor was all doom and gloom. She spent so much time telling me about the high mortality rate of having a bone marrow transplant that I half-expected her to end the appointment by handing me a shovel and telling me to go ahead and start digging my own grave. One thing that I understood very clearly from her words was that with the transplant, timing was everything. You don’t want to wait too long to do the transplant, but you also have to make sure that you time it so that you are ready—mind, body and soul—to take the risk of the procedure. Do you remember that dot on the graph that the first oncologist had shown me? The “if I do nothing, I have between one and two years to live” dot? If the transplant did not go well, if I contracted a serious virus after completely wiping out my immune system, then I could die within weeks or even days after the procedure.

Graft-versus-host disease is more apt to be seen with bone-marrow transplants, not solid organ transplants.

Haematopoietic stem cell transplantation is not a term that is immediately recognizable to the general public but it is actually the same as the much more familiar ‘bone marrow transplantation’. The rather long phrase haematopoietic stem cell transplantation (HSCT) is now preferred because it covers not just transplantation of bone marrow itself but other types of transplant where the blood-forming (haematopoietic) stem cells of the graft come from non-marrow sources such as peripheral blood or umbilical cord blood. Worldwide, about 50,000 HSCTs are carried out each year making this overwhelmingly the most important type of stem cell therapy in current practice. Most are done for treatment of cancer, mainly lymphomas and leukaemias, with about 5 per cent for treatment of non-malignant blood diseases and a few other conditions.

One can imagine a future where you might biobank microbes from your youthful skin in a tube in a freezer, which would become part of your retirement package to boost skin appearance and overall health later in life. This personal biobank could also be useful if you were diagnosed with cancer and needed a bone marrow transplant, or if you suddenly got a C. difficile infection and needed to boost your microbiome at a critical time. We might also see the application of younger persons’ microbes into commercially available products to cultivate the healthful effects of vigorous youthful microbes later in life.

That was always our solution, to go back in time. We discussed it the way others spoke of bone marrow transplants and radiation. [...] The dial was ours, and she would be at our mercy, just as she had always been, only this time we would pay attention and keep her safe. [...] We hoped that by preparing ourselves for the worst, we might be able to endure the inevitable with some degree of courage or grace. [...] Our mother was back in her room and very much alive, probably watching a detective program on television. Maybe that was her light in the window, her figure stepping out onto the patio to light a cigarette. We told ourselves she probably wanted to be left alone, that's how stoned we were. We'd think of this later, each in our own separate way. I myself tend to dwell on the stupidity of pacing a cemetery while she sat, frightened and alone, staring at the tip of her cigarette and envisioning her self, clearly now, in ashes.

Work on the right decision problem. The way you frame your decision at the outset can make all the difference. To choose well, you need to state your decision problems carefully, acknowledging their complexity and avoiding unwarranted assumptions and option-limiting prejudices.” “Specify your objectives. A decision is a means to an end. Ask yourself what you most want to accomplish and which of your interests, values, concerns, fears, and aspirations are most relevant to achieving your goal.” “Create imaginative alternatives. Remember: your decision can be no better than your best alternative.” Everything has an opportunity cost, which is the loss of potential gain from other alternatives when one alternative is chosen. “Understand the consequences. Assessing frankly the consequences of each alternative will help you to identify those that best meet your objectives—all your objectives.” “Grapple with your tradeoffs. Because objectives frequently conflict with one another, you’ll need to strike a balance. Some of this must sometimes be sacrificed in favor of some of that.” “Clarify your uncertainties. What could happen in the future, and how likely is it that it will?” “Think hard about your risk tolerance. When decisions involve uncertainties, the desired consequence may not be the one that actually results. A much-deliberated bone marrow transplant may or may not halt cancer.” “Consider linked decisions. What you decide today could influence your choices tomorrow, and your goals for tomorrow should influence your choices today. Thus many important decisions are linked over time.

the case of Nelene Fox. Fox was from Temecula, California, and was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer in 1991, when she was thirty-eight years old. Surgery and conventional chemotherapy failed, and the cancer spread to her bone marrow. The disease was terminal. Doctors at the University of Southern California offered her a radical but seemingly promising new treatment—high-dose chemotherapy with bone marrow transplantation. To Fox, it was her one chance of cure. Her insurer, Health Net, denied her request for coverage of the costs, arguing that it was an experimental treatment whose benefits were unproven and that it was therefore excluded under the terms of her policy. The insurer pressed her to get a second opinion from an Independent medical center. Fox refused—who were they to tell her to get another opinion? Her life was at stake. Raising $212,000 through charitable donations, she paid the costs of therapy herself, but it was delayed. She died eight months after the treatment. Her husband sued Health Net for bad faith, breach of contract, intentional infliction of emotional damage, and punitive damages and won. The jury awarded her estate $89 million. The HMO executives were branded killers. Ten states enacted laws requiring insurers to pay for bone marrow transplantation for breast cancer. Never mind that Health Net was right. Research ultimately showed the treatment to have no benefit for breast cancer patients and to actually worsen their lives. But the jury verdict shook the American insurance industry. Raising questions about doctors’ and patients’ treatment decisions in terminal illness was judged political suicide.