With the FLAG-IDA course complete I was given a very short course of another chemotherapy drug, this I think was ultimately what killed my bone marrow off to make way for the donors. This made me feel sicker and led to the worst couple of days of all. My face was all puffy and my skin started to dry up and crack. This is the point at which your bone marrow is killed off and your body is not producing any stem cells (which become new skin cells, red blood cells, white blood cells etc.). It felt as if I was going off, like a piece of fruit.
On the 23rd April 2009 at around 11am the big day had come. The nurse on duty brought in a bag of salmon coloured liquid and attached it to the machine and the machine to me. Very much like a blood transfusion, it was just a case of sitting still and watching day time television. The process was painless and was a bit of an anti-climax.
13.6 million stem cells were fed into my blood stream. Stem cells should not be in the bloodstream and the body knows this, so it absorbs them into the lungs. Stem cells do not live in the lungs either so the body absorbs them to the lowest level, the bone marrow where they do belong. Much to my delight the chemo stops too.
As the days passed there is a juggling act of ‘rejection’ where just as if you had an organ transplant the body tries to reject the foreign cells. You get (and should have a little bit of) something called graft-vs-host disease which is your body reacting to the foreign implant, the stem cells in my case. I was given a course of anti-rejection drugs to help the bone marrow settle. The dosage was high to start with and then as my body started to accept the donor’s bone marrow this anti-rejection drug was slowly phased out over a period of a couple of months. The nurses would take samples of my blood and bone marrow from time to time to test how much of the bone marrow was ‘me’ (which we didn’t want) and how much of it was the ‘donor’ (which we did want).
Eventually my hair grew back, it was a different colour than it had been before but it grew back. My blood group changed too. Over time my hair did return to its pre-transplant natural colour.
I was lucky to be young enough and healthy enough to be offered the option of getting rid of this disease entirely instead of a containment option (or living with the cancer). I was 33 at the time and was in fairly good but not athletic shape. I was a smoker (5-10 a day) and had been for 20 years, right up until I was diagnosed. I was advised by my consultant before the treatment began that it would be best if I gave up the fags as I needed the give my body the best chance of beating the illness and to be in the best shape for the treatment as it was going to be tough. I have not touched a cigarette since.
