Welcome - Read First!

Maybe you've heard of stem-cell transplants, but you might not have.  It's a pretty recent medical treatment, primarily for auto-immune disorders and blood-related cancers.  If you haven't heard of stem-cell transplants, the odds are good you've heard of bone-marrow transplants - their predecessor.  And you've probably very likely heard stem-cells mentioned before - they're in the news a lot these days.

I've had a stem-cell transplant, and this is my story.  If you're one of the following people, this blog should be useful to you:

1. Someone with an auto-immune disorder or blood-related cancer, such as leukemia, lymphoma, myeloma (also some mass tumor diseases, such as testicular cancer and some carcinomas, especially in children).
2. Anyone considering a bone-marrow or stem-cell transplant to treat their disorder.
3. Any patient undergoing medical tests or procedures - short or long - where they may experience physical or emotional discomfort, pain or distress and are looking for a strategy for dealing with pain, fear and anxiety throughout the procedure.
4. The care-givers, family and friends of anyone in the above categories.
5. Those curious about state-of-the-art medical treatment advancements.

The information in this blog is best accessed by the page links on the right side-bar.  On each of those pages is a table of contents that links each piece to a blog entry on my home page.  Since I'm back-filling data after the fact, the entries on my home page will be in no particular order until this back-filling is complete, so that's probably the worst page to try and read this blog - ignore it and focus on the pages listed below it.

Depending on your interest you may want to focus on the pages as follows:

1. Curious about the stem-cell transplant process itself?  See the pages from Transplant Basics through Milestone tests.
2. Curious about my pain management strategy?  See the Pain Management and PAG pages.
3. Curious about my personal progression with a blood-related illness?  See the My Status Updates page.

Note: By April, 2012 I should have most of the blog entries caught up to date.  Thereafter you can either watch My Status Update page for new entry hot links or look at the most recent entries in the Home page to see what's new.