What We Learned So Far

We met this morning with Dr. Kadia (leukemia doc). He said what has appeared to have happened is that her transplant hasn't "failed". Her donor cells have taken over all but one of her chromosomes and that is a diseased chromosome. It is easier for them to look at her cells because her donor was male so they are looking for XY in the chromosomal make up of the cells.

Now that we are all really confused. What will probably happen.

Today, Kristen has another bone marrow biopsy so they can get all the goods on her marrow. They need to give her another round of Induction Chemotherapy to move her back into remission. This will be followed by 2 rounds of Consolidation Therapy. We speak to the transplant doc tomorrow to find out what they will do after these consolidation rounds. One option we know about is collecting a few more of the donor cells infusing them. Kristen will most likely begin treatment either Friday or Monday.

Now to go back and kind of explain this all, when Kristen was diagnosed in January 2009 the cytogenetics showed that she had AML with mutations on certain chromosomes. She was treated for the AML and successfully went into remission. After this she went through 3 rounds of consolidation. She had the transplant in June because this was the best option for long term remission of the AML. It was not a guarantee. Apparently in many respects her body successfully accepted the new cells. She just has a particular difficult chromosome that refuses to let the donor cells take over. The hopes with doing chemotherapy again is that it will attack the bad cells and then the good donor cells will come back strong enough to be fully in charge.

We still have lots of questions to be answered so I will keep you posted.