Hopkins: No Second Transplant

On Thursday October 10 we made our way to Baltimore to visit the director of the stem cell transplant program at Johns Hopkins. He is not in favor of performing a second transplant on me. In fact, he says that in many cases he has begun to discourage the use of even first-time transplants, in favor of some of the novel chemotherapeutic agents that have appeared in recent years. He specifically mentioned pomalidomide and carfilzomib, both of which I have discussed in earlier posts. Compared with them, a second transplant, and for that matter increasingly even a first transplant, does not do so well in cost/benefit terms -- where "cost" is an expression not so much of money but of risks, side effects, and recovery time; and "benefit" is an expression of the quality of the response and the time to progression. To use his formulation, the novel agents are gradually transforming "a bad nasty disease that kills people" into "a bad nasty chronic condition". They are in no sense curative. But we'll have to take what we can get.

He will communicate his views to my Christiana oncologist, who I am scheduled to visit next week.

Obviously I am relieved by this verdict. None of the proposed regimens will involve anything like the ructions that would be caused by a transplant. I think Huong may be even happier than I am about it; after I started talking about the possibility of a second transplant, I thought I heard her get her suitcases out to start packing.

Meanwhile, daily life has not remained on hold. I continue to work, and I am eating and sleeping normally (although the dexamethasone has me a bit wired, and is causing night sweats). The dexamethasone is doing a good job of keeping down the pain. I can still drive motor vehicles. I confess to not having returned to my normal fitness regimen, as I'm a bit paranoid about the spinal deterioration. Since the myeloma is no longer under control, that cannot be doing anything other than getting worse. Huong is encouraging me to investigate aquatic therapies, which seems like a good low-impact idea.