August 31, 2018 - cancelling consolidation rd 4, taking a mental time out

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*Some content copied from Facebook Posts*

After recovering from my eye infection we spent a couple weeks enjoying life. We had a trip to Henry Ford Museum and I went with some friends to see Taylor Swift. I was scheduled to go back into the hospital for my 4th round of chemo over labor day weekend, but it got cancelled. Here is what I posted on Facebook at that time:

Aug 31:

Warning: very real and mostly depressing post ahead.

Today I saw my oncologist.

He is cancelling my 4th and final round of consolidation chemotherapy due to this most recent infection. Apparently the infection in my eye was much more severe and dangerous than I knew at the time, and they are afraid that another round of chemotherapy will result in a life-ending infection.

Now I am at a cross roads.

I can do nothing, which leaves me with a 95% chance of the leukemia coming back, and most likely coming back soon (within months).

After that point there is not much they would be able to do for me, especially because of my susceptibility to infections, which would make them unlikely to give me chemo again in the future.

I can do a transplant, which MD Anderson in Texas has agreed to do. But there's a matter of figuring out a suitable donor. And we would need to move to Texas for about 4 months. And the transplant itself has a lot of risks, including life threatening infection, graft vs host disease, and risk of my neuroendocrine tumors growing. And there is still a 70% chance that the leukemia comes back after the transplant, with no guarantee that the chance of recurrence is any further in the future than chemo only (i.e. could do it and still relapse in 6 months)

It's a big decision, and I really don't know what do. Either way i choose, the outlook isnt great. My infectious disease specialist told me today that I should probably go on a vacation.