How my sister’s cells attacked my body, and changed my life.
“It would be another 25 years before I learned about blood tissue, cells, genes and DNA. Before I would understand that I’d become a sort of human chimera. Like the fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology — with a lion’s head, a goat’s body and a serpent’s tail — my body was no longer just my own. I was host to my sister and myself.”
I knew it was a medical Hail Mary play — a first-of-its-kind procedure in Canada, with an eight per cent chance of success.
It was 1988 and my leukemia, diagnosed after a routine visit to a walk-in clinic, was not responding to treatment. Rare and lethal, Byphenotypic Acute Leukemia is a combination of two other forms of blood cancer. Conventional therapies would not work. But experimental options were not turning out well, either. Four months of clinical trials not only failed to put me in remission, they caused life-threatening infections and two grand mal seizures that left me in a coma.
I’d been told a bone marrow transplant might be possible, if I achieved remission, if I could find my own donor.
I managed to convince a doctor to ignore the first condition. It would be a research project, he said, although no extraordinary measures would be taken to keep me alive if something went wrong.
I didn’t flinch when I signed the Do Not Resuscitate form.
…
