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I was so eager to find out some details on who matched,the place of the birth of donor etc to get an idea if proximity of birth place matters.. sadly, the blog misses those details. Does anybody know who matched?
Congratulations! My life was just extended going through the same exact thing your going to go through. I am 7 months out and life is grand. Be thankful for the small things like popsicles, laughing, and cold wash-clothes when you start throwing up. Everything will be wonderful. Best of luck to you Amit!
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wow, and you were the one who got me! i "was" in the same boat..passed it up, but after reading your post and the follow up, i just had to signed up. good luck; eat healthy. update: just finished signing up and it took a whole 7 mins. thanks for the nudge :) http://dl.dropbox.com/u/103326/Slingshot/Pictures/Screen%20S...
This just pushed me into signing up too. I thought it would be a long complicated process. It wasn't. Definitely worth it.
This is really great and i wish him well, but to my understanding at the ending of the post, even if all of this is successful, Amit still has a really short life expectancy? Can he perpetually do this over and over again to combat the disease and prolong his life longer? That must be incredibly difficult to deal with.
It depends. If the cancer relapses it can be resistant to chemotherapy I've been exposed to before, which makes the prognosis a lot worse. There are alternative chemotherapies though and they can repeat the transplant. But yeah, if they can eradicate all traces of the cells now, and if the donor T -cells succeed in fighting off any cancerous cells that remain, the odds are a lot better. It is difficult to deal with,…
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Yep, perpetuates for life. It's called Chimerism. I'd be interested (obviously) in finding out what other implications this might have for me long term besides enabling me to life a life of crime. ;-)
I was gonna say, walking around with someone else's blood sounds like it'd make for an entertaining crime drama episode.
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Oh no, I'm going to be that person. Thank science! (And also those people who participated in a campaign to help him get a match.) My mom was diagnosed with a rare variant of AML (APML or APL) in April 2011. When she was admitted to the hospital, she had at maximum one or two days left to live before she would have hemorrhaged to death without medical attention (no platelets). When APML was first discovered in 1957,…
A lot of people who believe in God, can credit human discovery and science to the God given ability to learn things. This isn't a place for this discussion so I am not going to go further into this. We should all be happy for Amit and anyone who finds a 10/10 match. I know I was thankful for my donor.
> At this point, my blood type changes to the blood type of my donor. And my blood will now have my donor’s DNA, not my own. That's actually really fascinating. This perpetuates for life? This would seem to imply that a person who's received a transplant will, thirty years later, be walking around with two separate sets of DNA, as the other cells in the body presumably would not change. Given that DNA is (indirectly)…
Yep, perpetuates for life. It's called Chimerism. I'd be interested (obviously) in finding out what other implications this might have for me long term besides enabling me to life a life of crime. ;-)
> At this point, my blood type changes to the blood type of my donor. And my blood will now have my donor’s DNA, not my own. That's actually really fascinating. This perpetuates for life? This would seem to imply that a person who's received a transplant will, thirty years later, be walking around with two separate sets of DNA, as the other cells in the body presumably would not change. Given that DNA is (indirectly)…
I'm rather surprised that a bone marrow match wouldn't have the same blood type. I guess I shouldn't be though. Edit: chimera coder Huh. :)
We see so many initiatives regarding cancer, yet as cliché as it sounds, you never really understand it until it strikes close to home. My girlfriend was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins Lymphoma a month ago and is going through chemo and radiation right now.
In the past I might have glossed over things like Amit's story, breast cancer awareness month and pro football players wearing pink shoes...but now it gives me a ton of hope (which I really need) that things like this can save people's lives.