Medical Musings: The most punishing procedure in all of medicine

Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The most punishing procedure in all of medicine

There was an article in the New Yorker from 1998 describing the type of autologous stem-cell transplant (aSCT) that I'll be having, only it was for leukemia, a close cousin but still a quite different disease.

A Healing Hell

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They spam, I moderate. When you send a comment, it will disappear for a bit until I am notified. It hasn't been eaten. On the plus side, I can now reply to questions or suggestions, if you have any, in the comments!

About Me

I have multiple myeloma, a rare, incurable, universally-fatal blood cancer. The average survival in 1998 for the newly-diagnosed was three years with conventional chemo, five years with a autologous bone-marrow transplant. Through a combination of diligent study and miraculous luck, I'm in good shape more nearly fourteen years later.

I've had just about every treatment medicine has to offer: chemotherapy, autologous transplant, allogeneic transplant from a matched but unrelated donor (a MUD), and a donor lymphocyte infusion (DLI).

I started blogging just before I was scheduled to have a second autologous transplant in early 2009, but there was too much cancer in the marrow. I was devastated. By November, my tumor burden was astronomically high: I had run out of time.

So I gambled on the rare and dangerous allogeneic transplant from a matched but unrelated donor, which is when I began this blog in earnest, but after a month I couldn't blog because I had become so weak I couldn't lift my hands to the keyboard. I was hospitalized for nearly three months; nearly died three times; and I continue in recovery more than a year later. My wife was once told to make "final arrangements" for me.

I wanted especially to describe my struggle with fear. Fear often leads to bad medical decisions: its acid eats away ones quality of life. Fear leads to too much treatment too soon, or to treatment too long delayed. I hope to explain the tools I've developed to neutralize it. I am writing a book on the subject which I hope to finish before I'm financially destitute: who plans to retire at age 53?

Along the way I'll try to provide the context of my life inside of which these tools work. Also, I can't resist the occasional digression.

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Tuesday, February 3, 2009

The most punishing procedure in all of medicine

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