Yes, we are still in NC and you won't see any pictures of us packing to go back to Cambridge tomorrow. We got the OK from my hematologist at Dana Farber to postpone our Feb 15th appointment and stay here for another couple of weeks as long as I have no fever. My next appointment is now Monday, Feb. 27th.
Here is a picture of what this is all about. These are bone marrow stem cells.
I’ve also been in quite a bit of communication with the nurse who will be coordinating various services once I get into the transplant process. She has been my primary contact with the woman managing the search for a donor. They had eliminated all the live donor possibilities in the Registry. My son Ron was typed when he was in Boston. I got his typing this week and it looked very close to me. Unfortunately, close is not good enough. He does have the very rare antigen that I have, but he has two antigens that are not close enough. We have now typed Jennifer and her husband Scott; in part, this is to see if Jen might be close enough, but mostly it is to estimate whether the umbilical cord they saved from Zac might be close enough.
There are two bits of good news. They have found ten cords in the 40K stored for the registry that appear to be close enough. Recall that cords do not need to be exact matches like live donors. I don’t think that the bone marrow donor committee has yet discussed these.
I got a very enthusiastic message from Deborah, the person in charge of the actual search, that a new potential donor had “popped.” I don’t know the background here, whether this is a new person in the database, or why this donor has just shown up. It is the first time Deborah has ever sent me email directly, and so I’m assuming that the match on paper is an exact one. She has sent out the message requesting blood samples for an “urgent” confirmation.
My doctor is out of town the week of the 20th of February, and so he said I could stay until the following week, but he instructed his assistant to make my appoint early Monday morning the 27th. This means he wants to see me as soon as he gets back. My appointment is a 9am.
The bone marrow donor committee at Dana Farber should have time to discuss and recommend a donor direction.
Below are two more postings I've made today.
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