So glad your wife is well. I too had a SCT. Mine was a donor from my sister
About your wife, did she develop MDS before leukemia? Did it turn to AML? Not sure if you remember. I have AML - 1 yr remission and have come across a few with your wife’s circumstances.
Scary times, life changing. So glad she’s well.
Holly, my wife had breast cancer. Very aggressive. She had a surgeries to remove the tumor, and it was found in her lymph nodes. She went through six rounds of standard chemotherapy. Then she had another surgery to instal a port in her chest for easy access to her circulatory system. She was given drugs that overstimulated her bone marrow, best way I can describe it is the drugs caused the excess marrow to “ooze out of the bone” and into her bloodstream. For two weeks she received a daily injection of this drug. For 10 days, everyday, her port was hooked up to a centrifuge and they spun off a packet of the marrow. The marrow was then frozen in liquid nitrogen.
At this point, there was no top limit on the amount of chemo since her own marrow had been preserved. She was placed in isolation and hooked up to gallon jugs of Taxol (I saw the bill; each jug cost $60,000, I kid you not, in 1995 dollars). The Taxol killed the cancer but also killed her marrow. After two or three days, they flushed the taxol out of her system, and then brought in the tank of liquid nitrogen with her preserved packets of bone marrow. They thawed them out some warm water, and injected them back into her bloodstream through the port.
Then, while the marrow repopulated her bones, she was basically without an immune system for two weeks in the isolation unit. Even in as sterile room as they could provide, she got very sick.
And then she came home to our then six and two year old sons the day before Thanksgiving.
And she is still going strong today.