Tagged stem cell

Cell-Bye Date (part III)

Robert Graves

‘…The unendurable moment struck –

The inward scream, the duty to run mad.’

– Robert Graves, Recalling War

possible2‘”I’ve had such a curious dream!” said Alice, and she told her sister, as well as she could remember them, all these strange Adventures of hers.’

 – Lewis Carroll, Alice in Wonderland

 

They called it shell-shock in the First World War. At first the doctors were puzzled; these were men who were alive – they had survived, left the Front for good, come back as heroes. And still they were paralysed by fear; stammering, unable to speak. Many of them had suffered no injury to the brain, yet they had the kind of symptoms which accompany a wound to the head: dizziness, hearing voices, trembling. Memory loss.

I’ve mentioned the dangers of a transplant. I’ve said how the conditioning treatment – the high-dose chemo and the radiation they give you first, to delete your own stem cells and make way for the donor’s – inflicts a similar kind of devastation to the organs as chemical warfare, as nuclear radiation. Chemotherapy was, incidentally, conceived in the wake of the First World War, when veterans were found to have reduced bone marrows and lymph nodes after exposure to mustard gas.

I went into the transplant with the grim determination of a young conscript. I knew it could kill me. I knew that patients were frequently rushed to intensive care. I knew, as well, that there was no alternative. I signed the consent form.

I managed to develop all the complications I’d heard about, and a few more besides. I contracted a form of pneumonia, which left me feverish, with a violent cough. My liver started failing. My heart rate ran dangerously high, my blood pressure rocketed. Then the Graft-versus-Host-Disease set in; as the donor’s cells recognised my own as foreign, they began to attack – my skin flared up and I suffered a bout of gastro-enteritis.

Worst of all was the mucositis. I had been warned about it beforehand. The mucous membrane, from the oral cavity to the entire digestive system, becomes inflamed; the tongue swells up and develops painful ulcers, the gums bleed.

But nothing could have prepared me for the nightmare which spiralled into each oncoming day, or the ghost train ride which arrived in the evenings, without fail, and shuttled along every night.

At first you notice a slight soreness in your throat, the pills refuse to go down. Then it becomes impossible to eat or drink. A small sip of water is unbearable. Even swallowing your own saliva delivers a jolt of agony. Most patients are fed through a tube in their nose; for some reason, the nurses didn’t manage to fit one through mine, so all my medications, my daily calories and nutrition were transfused through my Hickman line, the rubber tube which had been inserted into a vein under my collar bone.

The pain is like nothing I’ve ever experienced. At night I was lucky if I slept half an hour. I would try to sleep sitting up; my air-ways were so constricted that I struggled to breathe when I lay down, spluttering and coughing. My oxygen levels would drop and the nurses would fit me with a mask.

I used to start retching uncontrollably, nauseated and overwhelmed with hunger pangs. I was starving, I was parched with thirst. But I was unable to ingest anything. For more than two weeks I could not brush my teeth. I could not speak. I could barely move my lips more than a couple of millimetres. I filled three whole notebooks and masses of pages of Word documents on my laptop, as I had to communicate somehow with the doctors and nurses, with my parents.

I read them over now; it’s like seeing the words of another person. Usually I remember everything; details of a conversation I had with a friend years ago. The first time I looked back over the pages of my own handwriting, from just a month earlier, I didn’t recognise them at all. There are the parts that seem plausible enough, that I can imagine having written – the requests for ice cubes to numb the aching, for anti-nausea injections in my stomach, for the nurses to increase my morphine dose – I was connected to an intravenous drip at all hours to reduce the pain, unplugged only for a few minutes each day to have a shower.

Then there is the odd sentence which seems to come, out of nowhere, and I don’t know whether to laugh, or gasp, or how to breathe, because this was a few months ago only, and the words are mine;  I know and I can’t, still, place them in my mind’s eye, I can’t see them as anything other than the progeny of a sick joke, some kind of hyperbolic underworld.

‘I’m scared,’ I had written to my dad, at one point. ‘Don’t let them lie to me. Am I getting near the end?’

Cell-Bye Date (part II)

 

nolan

A stem cell transplant is supposed to save your life, but there are times when you don’t feel alive. First you’re hit with high-dose chemo and radiotherapy – total body irradiation, that is: lying in a kind of human fish tank while a machine shoots you with waves of 14.4 Grays. It’s like you’re a computer being fitted with a new hard drive; before they can install the healthy bone marrow, they want to demolish all trace of your own errant cells. The whole process, I’ve been told, inflicts the same kind of destruction on the body as a nuclear attack.

The first bombshell came for me, though, when the question of donors arose. My sister had already been tested and found incompatible (siblings are only a match in around 25% of cases).

Then came the uncertainty, and the sense of powerlessness, as the search for an unrelated donor began. All I could do was wait and hope that a match would be found. The consultant warned that it might not be possible due to my ‘mixed background.’

I’d never thought of myself as mixed, but it turns out that having a Jewish-Hungarian father and a Croatian mother is far from ideal. In fact, the chances of finding a match with a Jewish background, I recently discovered, are only around 40%. (‘As though being persecuted down the ages wasn’t enough,’ my dad lamented).

Donors are matched according to cell tissue, of which there are millions of different types. I was astonishingly lucky to be found a 10/10 match in a matter of weeks.

But not everyone is as fortunate as I was. Some people go for years enduring gruelling rounds of chemotherapy while they wait for a suitable donor to appear on the register. Others don’t survive.

The more people join the register, the better the chances of finding a match for everyone with a blood cancer. All it takes to sign up is a bit of saliva in a sample tube.

Cell-Bye Date (part I)

Elizabeth I

Elizabeth I famously claimed to have the heart and stomach of a man.

I don’t have the Spanish Armada to contend with, but I do have a brand-new male bone marrow, courtesy of a 24 year-old ‘chunky lad’ who was generous enough to give away six million of his cells to a complete stranger.

Beyond his age and his robust stature, I haven’t been told anything about my donor. I’ve never met him, and in all likelihood, I’ll probably never get the chance. And yet he may well have saved my life. Although I went into remission after the first cycle of chemotherapy, the doctors warned me that without a stem cell transplant, there was a 60% chance of the leukaemia returning with a vengeance – more aggressive and less treatable.

But that’s not to say it’s been an easy ride. As the consultant, world-weary, opined today: ‘You didn’t have to go and develop all the complications we told you about. The booklet was just to scare you. There’s no need to suffer from every single side effect.’

‘I haven’t,’ I countered. ‘I mean, death, for one. I’m still alive, so far.’

On the consent form I had to sign before the treatment, the transplant coordinator had saved the word until last on the list, under ‘Serious or frequently occurring risks’.

‘Some patients don’t want to know their chances, some want a percentage,’ she’d told me hurriedly. She didn’t wait for a reply. ‘You’re young. I’d say there’s only a 10-12% mortality risk in your case.’

Stem cells are so often talked about these days in tones of mystified awe, and they’re fast becoming seen as a magical panacea for all manner of diseases and conditions. But I think it’s fair to say that many of us – including myself, pre-leukaemia – have a pretty hazy idea of what a bone marrow or stem cell transplant actually involves, including all the struggles along the way.

Aside from the agonising wait for a suitable donor, the sheer force of the treatment itself is beyond anything I could have imagined. Or, as my consultant remarked with a smile, when I enquired about the radiotherapy: ‘We use a dose that is lethal. In military terms, it’s very close to the atomic bomb.’

The things people say

Cancer, when it’s curable, is like North Korea. At times the prospect of imminent danger slips from your mind, and it fades into a dormant kind of fear. It is terrifying. But you don’t think it’s going to kill you. It becomes a nebulous constant in the background. At times you can even laugh about it.

Then suddenly it’s threatening you with missiles.

Or false alarms. You never know.

There are certain anecdotes you don’t want to hear first thing in the morning from a burly man equipped with a full set of needles, when you’re receiving blood transfusions and a nice batch of platelets before breakfast.

‘Girl in this room,’ the nurse told me. ‘10 years ago. Serbian. They were going to deport her. There were lots of delays. Then they tried a stem cell. The treatment wasn’t working.’

I didn’t know what to say.

‘In this bed here,’ he continued with a smile. ‘I remember it like yesterday. Such a nice girl.’

He stopped for a moment, cradling the packet of blood in both hands, then began again:

‘She was given three months to live.’

I felt cold.

He paused for effect.

‘She recently finished her degree. She’s a practising lawyer now.’ He was digging out his phone. I saw lots of hair and smiling teeth. ‘There she is with her fiancé.’

Not everyone, though, can manage to confront mortality and then raise a smile within the space of a few moments. I know that most people have the best of intentions, but some of the cack-handed questions and comments I’ve come across are stultifying. The ambulance driver who asked me brightly, with a big grin, ‘What are you going into hospital for?’ I had been diagnosed with leukaemia an hour earlier. I was in tears at the time. Or the message I received from a former university friend, some weeks ago, after posting several links to this blog on my personal page (as well as an accompanying explanation): ‘Hi Hannah, are you not well?’

Then there’s irony. Often best considered the privilege of the patient. I remember the smug-looking medical student who came in to examine me, bent my elbows at lots of awkward angles and asked too many questions, until a certain picture of a virtuous healthy lifestyle began to emerge. Never eaten meat, light drinker, keen swimmer and runner, tried a handful of cigarettes at most.

He threw his arms up in sarcastic lamentation. ‘Why, Hannah, why?’

On the other hand, I don’t mind being told how inordinately brave I am. It does scare me a little, though. It all seems very ominous. I feel like asking, do you know something that I don’t? I thought the prognosis was encouraging.

The same goes for all the tower of inspiration rhetoric. I don’t agree, but I lap it up anyway. Or people praying for me.

But when there’s any doubt over what to say, an anonymous gift never goes amiss. I’m still trying to establish who sent me this. Thank you to the mystery sender:

teddy