Bone Marrow

We met with the bone marrow dept of the hospital today. It was good information, and lots of it. A little overwhelming and depressing and scary at the same time. Of course they have to be completely honest with us and tell us about all of the possible complications - some of which we don't really want to think about. The number one priority right now is to get the cancer back in remission so that they can do a transplant. But the transplant can't happen unless she is in remission - and doing the transplant is her best chance.

So here is the deal. We apparently don't really need to do any type of bone marrow drive. It sounds like they already have several possible matches so they are just trying to find the best candidate over the next couple of months. Hopefully, they will prove to be good matches once testing is completed. They also have a registry of donated cord blood that they can use, and jake jr's cord blood is plan C since it will be cutting it close timewise.

For everyone who has asked if they can donate marrow, they suggest going to the registry (see the link i posted the other day) or go give blood. Sounds like they need blood worse than marrow, which makes sense as Chloe has had many transfusions - probably 3 this week. So I can see how the blood would be in much higher demand. However, i'm sure there are lots of other kids, or adults who could use a bone marrow transplant - its probably a good idea for all of us to donate blood and become a marrow donor.

Over the next few months her chemotherapy will be pretty inteste with the purpose of making sure the cancer is in remission. The actual bone marrow transplant is prepped for with 3 days of radiation twice a day, two days of really intense chemo and then the transplant. The actual transplant is just a bag of marrow/stem cells sent through her IV. The cells find their way into the bones and it takes about 3 weeks for them to start building up her immune system again.

The scary part is [heck, its all scary if you ask me] after the transplant. We will have to live down here so that if she develops a fever we can get to PMC asap so she can be treated immediately. Possible side effects of all this are maybe slowed growth, possibility of another cancer developing, and infertility -probably more, but i can't remember. The infertitlity is pretty likely. The other two are not too likely and not ideal, but we don't have a whole lot of options right now.