Bleak day today...I had a look in my file, there was an unofficial note from the lab, of the HLA Class II typing for me and my brother. There is no match. I recall the consultant saying that a Class II match is important for a bone marrow transplant. I told myself, it's only an unofficial note, there could be a mistake, and I should wait for the official report. But official or unofficial, it's the content that matters. Unless the nurse who took the note down was deaf or illiterate, i don't think there'll be much of a difference.
So what will this mean to me? Is there hope? I didn't know...so being the curious smarty pants, I grabbed the Manual of Clinical Hematology on my desk and started reading. Here are some quotes from the book:
"Patients who have a relapse after a short first remission or refractory AML patients who never attained a complete remission following standard therapy, known as primary treatment failures, are best entered into experimental clinical trials." (pg 220)
"Another optional treatment regimen for refractory patients is allogeneic BMT if a compatible sibling donor is available." (pg 220)
From the table "Anticipated patient outcome using autologus and sibling-matched allogeneic transplants in malignent disorders in adult patients" (pg 407)
Disease - AML
State - Primary refractory disease
Allograft (sibling donor) - 10% cure
Autograft (own stem cells) - rarely performed
I was initially diagnosed with AML M4, then refractory AML when I did not respond to the initial standard chemotherapy. It looks like things are getting more difficult for me. It started as "don't worry, leukemia is now one of the most curable cancers these days" to "there's a possibility that I don't have a donor and autologus transplants are rarely performed on refractory AML patients." Why oh why did i ever open that book??!!
Tomorrow I'll ask the doctor about it. To be honest, I'm kind of scared. I'd rather not worry about it, but dad says that HLA typing is a very sensitive test, so maybe we could repeat the test on all my siblings, just to be sure. So the sooner I ask the doctor the sooner we can repeat the test and get the results.
In the meantime, I'll just try hard to not think about these trying times. Maybe another session of Starcraft will help me gain some peace of mind. I'm feeling bummed out, but I will not give up. There must be a way that I can get better, sooner or later.
The good news is that I still haven't caught a fever and my cough is getting better.
Hope tomorrow will be a better day.
Over and out.
