Hi @majid12 I know you wife’s journey with AML and a transplant all too well. This type of leukemia requires some heavy artillery to win the war. But each battle is worth fighting. 🙂

She’ll begin her fight with at least 1 round of chemo for a week. The first one is called the Induction phase. It will be used to knock down the cancer cells in blood/marrow and hopefully get her into a temporary remission.

Then she’ll have a waiting period of about 28 days while her blood numbers rise again. After that, there will most likely be another round of chemo referred to as Consolidation. It helps to ensure most of the cancer cells are gone. Her type of AML is aggressive. So even though it looks like she’s in remission, it has a way of returning. That’s why the bone marrow transplant is necessary. Her old bone marrow failed to recognize the cancer cells. So they were allowed to proliferate. The hope is that the new immune system she’ll receive from her sibling will again recognize the cancer cells and destroy them. It’s really very fascinating.

If her transplant isn’t soon after that Consolidation, she may have another session of chemo again. It’s important to keep the body in remission so that most of the cancer is gone before going into transplant.

She may feel nauseated and lose her hair, like I mentioned. But for me, once I started chemo, I actually began to feel better because the cancer cells were dying off! My fever went away, I regained my strength and I started feeling human again! I was fit and ready for my transplant.

I don’t have many family members so I had to go through bone marrow registry for my donor. Transplant teams often look to siblings for the donors so you’re wife is fortunate to have some brothers and sisters. They’ll be asked for either swab samples from inside their mouth or blood samples to check for a match.
The transplant itself is basically a blood transfusion. But instead of blood, the bag is filled with stem cells and takes less than 1/2 hour to be infused through a port. It’s pretty anticlimactic considering all of the drama leading up to it!

Several days before the transplant can happen though, there will another session of chemo called Conditioning. This chemo prepares the bone marrow to receive the new stem cells from her donor. It’s necessary to clean out the old bone marrow so that the new, cancer free cells have a place to set up housekeeping. It takes a minimum of 10 days to reach engraftment and sometimes longer. That’s when the new cells start producing blood cells in their new environment.
Your wife will have a very compromised immune system while all of this is going on. So she will be taking a lot of medications to keep her healthy.

I know this all sounds complicated and intimidating. And it is… But her doctors and their teams of nurses will be guiding her through this journey one step at a time.

I’m so relieved that you’re able to be with her and I know she’s going to feel so much better having you home! She will be required to have a caregiver with her especially during the transplant and recovery period.
Has she begun her chemo yet?