Time to Beat Cancer

  This will be just a short post. As anyone following my story knows, I was expecting to have my bone marrow transplant this week as well as the pre-transplant chemo. My first 10/10 donor had proven unable to be contacted so we had been on the 2nd 10/10 donor; a Polish woman on the German registry. At the end of my last post, on Thursday August 26th, it was confirmed that the Anthony Nolan charity had requested that I start the Chemotherapy after the donor had donated, and that their donation would be frozen while I had the chemotherapy. Apparently this has happened more often due to COVID, as obviously it would be bad if I went through the pre-transplant chemo and then COVID prevented the donation from happening. On Monday September 6th the day before the individual was supposed to donate, as I was getting my stuff ready to be admitted into hospital, I was called up by one of the transplant doctors. The donor had decided to pull out. Obviously this was really disappointing news. B...

This is the last post, before the big stuff. For those who have been reading and following my story you'll know that the first choice transplant match seemingly disappeared off the map, so we're using number 2. I mistakenly stated it was a German man, the individual is actually a Polish woman on the German registry. She is a 10/10 match just like the German man was but unlike him is actually the same blood group as me as well, which is good, in which case I'm not 100% sure why she wasn't the first choice donor originally. I'd imagine that it's due to male donors being generally preferred, the science goes over my head but this is apparently related to the size of the donor, with men generally being bigger, as well as whether the female donor has ever been pregnant as this has a big impact on their ability to be a bone marrow stem cells donor. Apologies if you are a Biology expert with your head in your hands reading my poor explanation (Sorry Mrs Matkins!) . Thi...