We just received the news that shobhinis bone marrow results from last Wednesday at Phoenix revealed no evidence of leukemia cells even by the most sophisticated analysis possible. So that is great news!
Now we will have to make a difficult decision regarding her ongoing treatment, whether to go through with a bone marrow transplant or not. It is a very aggressive and toxic treatment because the preparation involves high dose radiation to kill off her entire bone marrow cells and then inject her with the bone marrow cells from the donor. She may not survive the preparatory regimen and the risk of death is at least 5%, may be as high as 10-15%.
The survival for the subtype of leukemia she has is 20-30% at 5 yrs with the standard treatment and 50-60% is the 5 yr survival of patients with bone marrow transplant, but we are currently asking if there is anything other than transplant that may work. Unfortunately even Chemotherapy has a risk of up to 2% mortality with each round.
I think we should probably take her on at least a mini-vacation while she is doing well and the team feels we should begin treating her with chemotherapy while we decide about transplant. There are already several very good matches that have been identified.
So now we are interested in hearing about alternate therapies and people who have benefited from alternate therapies. Email me ! shanmathis@yahoo.com
