Day +156

I am fine today. I would like to talk about my pre-transplant preparation and struggle.

As mentioned on my blog Day +130, I explained the reasons that made me so determined to go for transplant, even though it is a high risk procedure.

The type of transplant that I went through was called sibling (brothers or sisters) Allogeneic Transplant. The stem cells from a matching brothers or sisters are first collected. The recipient then goes through heavy chemotherapy to strike off his or her own stem cells. After this, the stem cell from the donor is infused into the recipient vein. These stem cells will find their way miraculously into the recipient bone marrow to manufacture blood.

In order to find a matching sibling, a type of test called Human Leukocyte Antigen (HLA) typing need to be done. There is a probability of 25% that a sibling’s HLA will match each other. In other words, I should find a match in every four brothers or sisters. Since I have 8 brothers and sisters, I was very confident that I could find at least one match.

HLA is a group of genes that encodes the cell-surface antigen-presenting proteins. Only siblings with matched HLA are donor candidates. This is to make sure that once the donor stem cells started to function in the recipient, it will produce the same cell-surface antigen as before, and this prevent the new antigen to start an immune response to attack the host (recepient) organs, a symptom called Graft Versus Host Disease (GVHD).

To be continued and see you next post :-)