August 28, 2009 10:05 PM

We've come so far!

I was watching the movie "The Express" - the story of Ernie Davis, a great college football player who died of leukemia at the age of 23 in 1963 without ever playing a down of professional football.

Today the disease is not the death sentence that it once was. In the late 50's, bone marrow transplants only took place between identical twins! It was 1968 when the first sibling transplant took place and 1973 when the first unrelated donor transplant occurred. But it was in 1979 when the first SUCCESSFUL unrelated donor(allogeneic) transplant was accomplished.

This was done without the benefit of a bone marrow data base - a member of the hospital staff was deemed to be a good match. This, of course, prompted the need for a large bone narrow data base and the effort took off.

The National Bone Marrow Donor Registry was federally funded in 1986, in 1987 the first donor match was made. The data base now includes a network of donor registries in 30 countries. It contains more than 5.5 million donors and facilitates an average of 200 transplants each month. Boy, have we come a long way!

Of course, I went out on a web search for the above info. This also revealed a lot of other information that points to the seriosness of the whole procedure. One site had the following quote, "Depending on a number of factors, the treatment-related death rate from (bone marrow transplantation-BMT) ranges from 1% to 40%, making it the MOST DANGEROUS of all organ transplants. On the other hand, the potential benefits are enormous...In each individual patient considered for (BMT), the potential benefits of the transplant must outweigh its potential risks."

Not that I had too much choice in this matter - I had to go for it! But the way that everything has gone for me has totally belied the huge risk and all the side effects that you read about.

The more that I read, the more I can truly say that this has been a miracle...

Bob