May 3 is Third Time's a Charm

May 3 is the new start day. I will begin hospitalization and have the transplant sometime around May 10 or 11. I am very thankful that this decision came through at the last minute. Had it been even one day later, I would have started the irrevocable process of chemotherapy. Because the recovery for chemo is at least a month, this would have delayed the procedure even further.

As I sit here waiting for the donor, there is alway the fear that my cancer could come back. Usually, the doctors will administer chemo if the wait is about a month or longer. Additional chemotherapy ensures that I stay in remission and am able to move forward with the transplant. If I fall out of remission, my chances of surviving decrease from 40 percent to well below 10 percent. Time is not on my side, and I would much prefer to do the transplant as soon as possible.

Yet it is not enough to just keep pumping chemo into the transplant recipients while they wait. First off, chemo is not without its risks. Second, the real problem with chemo is that it takes about a month to recover once you start. So we could start chemo while waiting, get a response from the donor the next day, and have to delay the transplant another month as I recover. During that time, it is very likely that I could lose the donor for other reasons.

I think when this is done, I am going to advocate for some transparency. I understand that the donor and recipient should be isolated from one another, and I completely respect safeguards against privacy, voluntariness, and anonymity. These are the three reasons that neither I nor the doctors am allowed to speak with the donor center. However, given the situation and the life altering decisions that must be made (should we wait for donor 1, should we push for donor 2, should we commence chemo while waiting, etc), I firmly believe that the privacy concerns are somewhat vitiated by the doctor's need to know. Moreover, all communications with the donor center should fall under doctor patient confidentiality. Although we can argue that the doctor has a conflict of interest between the donor and donee, other professions handle similar conflicts with similar data and the stakes are much less. Again, I am not stating that I should be kept in the loop, but I am stating that my oncologist should be given some information about where the donor is in the readiness process.

Anyhow, May 2 is when finals start. I need to knock out as many of these tests before the transplant. For the next week, I'm going to use all my spare time to exercise and get these finals out of the way.

Please excuse any typos. Rather than proofread this, I'm going to continue studying Health Law, which may spark another entry later on "dying with dignity"--a very fitting thing to study at a time like this.