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| Tiresias |
The thought popped into my head unbidden. After the allogeneic transplant in 2010, my
chimerism tested 100% donor. In theory, that meant that none of my old blood and marrow remained in my body. In other blood cancers, such as lymphoma, donor lymphocytes (
DLIs) are often given after the allogeneic transplant to achieve the goal of 100% chimerism. But I wasn't 100% donor despite test results that claimed otherwise. The chimerism test simply isn't reliable for myeloma. Numerous malignant plasma cells were not picked up by the test and didn't count. But those remaining myeloma cells were clearly mine, not those of my donor. There were a great many of them as well.
Which is why we decided to do risky and exceedingly rare infusions of donor lymphocytes in the hope that they would destroy the remaining malignant plasma cells, which, in fact, they did, while almost destroying me as well. There is no remaining evidence of cancer, and today I probably am 100% donor (my fingernails probably have my original DNA, but for how much longer I can't say).
So I sent an email to a couple of hematology fellows that read something like this, brevity being the soul of wit:
If I accidentally dropped a little blood at a murder scene, would my donor be arrested?
