Day +163

I am fine today.

During my third chemotherapy, I met a man in his 40s who was admitted to the hematology ward due to fever. This man did his bone marrow transplant about two years ago as a treatment of aplastic anemia. It is a disease whereby the bone marrow fails to produce blood. This disease is caused by autoimmune disorder where the white blood cells attack the bone marrow. It can be treated by suppressing the body immune system through drug such as Ciclosporin (the drug that I am taking now to prevent GVHD). For more severe cases, bone marrow transplant is needed.

He was the first transplant patient that I met and was very enthusiastic in sharing his transplant experience with me, mostly talking on his unpleasant experience :-( One of his experiences that frightened me most is liver biopsy whereby some liver specimen is obtained by poking a needle through the chest. Initially, I thought every transplant patient have to go through this procedure. Fortunately, I find out later that most transplant patients do not need to do this. He needed liver biopsy because his liver did not function well due to GVHD, and thus doctor need to confirm the cause through liver biopsy.

We met quite often in the General Clinic while we were doing our follow-up. When we meet, he always likes to do head count, telling us who are ‘missing’ or so and so were doing follow-up with him, but now do not see them again. Some of my friends are very scared to talk with him :-(

He is very careful with the food that he eats. Even after two and half years after transplant, he never purchased pre-prepared food such as economic rice and uncooked food. When he wants to order food in the restaurant or food stall, he will stand there and instruct the cook how to prepare his meal. Basically, the requirement is to cook everything thoroughly and never add anything else such as soy sauce and chili or whatever seasoning to the cooked food. During last follow-up, he advised me not to take economic rice in the hospital, but at that time I already enjoyed my ‘big pack’ of economic rice with red fried sweet chicken with some vegetable. What else can I do? The food already goes into my stomach :-(

See you next post :-)