steel i feel sort of dickish for asking this but what are we looking at when it comes to success rate for this kind of thing and all that kind of shit?

and man that sounds really tough man, but if anyone can get through it you can. best wishes......

I know you're just joking (you are, right?) but it's much more difficult to get a bone marrow transplant.  Donor and recipient must have close resemblance in their antigen makeup (these are called HLA antigens), making random unrelated donor matches overwhelmingly unlikely.  Siblings are almost always the best bet.  This is why you should ask mommy and daddy for a kid brother or sister.

I am on two lists of active donors and have been called in to donate before (nice vacation, they fly you to washington, it hurts like fuck but you get 5 days paid vacation) but I didn't think it was this difficult to donate

sorry for getting hopes up

i watch too much House md, my hopes weren't risen

here's the bad part...adelines...brace yourself.

sounds real bad but you better not give in you fucking

good luck pal!!! maybe this tumor removal will take away the part of your brain that makes you an asshole...

that wouldn't leave much behind would it

they will preserve some of my bone marrow/stem cells before the treatment, I don't need donations.

also omeg metastasis to the brain is VERY possible, its chemo that can't penetrate blood brain.

also

Steel,

A friend of mine growing up had high-dose chemo (from Leukemia and a brain tumor) and survived.  She was I think 6 or 7 when she had it and actually had to have a marrow donor afterward.  However, the important part is that she survived and she's living a great life right now.  To this day, she actually does the art for the holiday cards for Memorial Children's Hospital (may be M.D. Anderson now -- this crap changes so quick down here) Cancer Center for Kids, here in Houston.

It's ugly, it sucks, and it can be painful as hell -- but keep in mind that a 6 year-old girl can go through it and pull through fine.  I'm sure you'll be able to do it.  Best of luck!

--Terin

this is honestly GOOD TO HEAR; I can only find sterile descriptions of high dose chemo and nothing about people who went through it. if she did it while she was six and was not DRIVEN MAD BY PAIN I hope I will be okay. who knows though, it's going to be rough.

yeah, Terin, that's really good to hear that a 6-year-old girl made it through high-dose chemo. if she could do it, i'm sure steel, who has already beaten cancer once, can do it too.
hey steel by the way you're kinda inspiring.
this is probably going to sound really dumb. so, i've thought a lot over these past few months about what it must be like for kids who go through cancer, and i had wanted to know how i could help. after a lot of research, i decided that it would be worthwhile to pursue a career that could help kids with cancer and other diseases. i want to work at a hospital when i'm older as a child therapist and i want to have the job of the person who gets close with the kids and explains to them everything that they're going to be going through. i've always been incredibly interested in things like that, and i have always wanted to be a counselor of some sort. since this school year started, i've been pursuing that goal. next year i'm taking AP psychology, sociology, and AP physiology among other things. and even if i dont end up working in a cancer hospital, i'm still interested in the classes. so uh, thanks for getting me more interested in this stuff, and i hope all continues to go well with your treatment

you'll probably kill yourself dude i saw one kid with cancer ONE and i could not bear it.

they still smile

a nurse told me THEY DONT REALLY UNDERSTAND DEATH and this made it so much worse fffffff.

seriously though I am considering doing BIG MONEY LAW just to donate all of it away because I bet I could do more good this way. I mean I know my chemo is a particularly rough one and most kids dont do something as bad as what I did or am going to do and I THANK GOD but I'm reminded of the day I had knee pain and someone in an attempt to make me feel better was like HEY SIX YEAR OLD KIDS DO THIS and aside from solidifying in my head NO THIS ISNT NORMAL CHEMO PAIN it also horrified me that a child could feel this level of pain. like chemo is constant pain for months and months and the worst part isn't that you feel but eventually your body gets used to being in constant pain. you are still in pain but you just don't notice it at much, it's like when you train as a marathon runner and the first few weeks are hardest because your body doesn't know this is a new state of affairs.

and the idea that kids have to adjust to a constant pain is just ffffff.

I dunno I wish I was a better writer so I could convey chemo and how awful it is. not because I want to be all HEH I DID THIS IM COOL but because it's such an incredibly awful experience and just saying "mild nausea, loss of hair" doesn't convey the feeling I had when I came home from the hospital and took my shirt off for the first time in front of a mirror and felt something break inside my head as I saw my bloated stretchmarked body and the right side just shaved with this awful disgusting THIRD EYE SLIT in my right chest like a fucking coin slot clotted with blood. it's like aging 20 years in a week.

yeah, six year-olds usually don't understand death unless they've had a pet death in the family or an actual grandparent dying or something (and the understanding doesn't come until after some time has passed for them to understand permanence)

i don't know what your high dose chemo will be like, but I really hope you don't have any more complicates similar to KNEE DAY because from the descriptions you gave us, it sounded like you were begging for mercy and willing to die which is absolutely horrible and unimaginable to me.

well it obviously varies from person from person, but from what I read kids below the age of six need some sort of experience with death (not necessarily personal) to ACTUALLY understand it.

it doesn't help that parents tend to shelter their children by giving them "childish," incomplete and often wrong definitions in order to ease them in on the concept. Many parents skip over the explanation of the term "forever" and choose to say something like "a very long time" when explaining the length of death.

the worst part about chemo is not that you think about dying.

it is that there are days you understand wanting to die.

no one here I think has really got an idea of wanting to die. some of you have been suicidal. but the fact you're still here means you didn't push the button, you didn't go through with it. something, even INCONVENIENCE, prevented you and kept you going. there were days on chemo if I had the option I would have CUT OFF THE OFFENDING ORGAN. no hesitation. if it meant it would stop HURTING i'd stop it. the only reason i did not take a hammer and smash my knees on knee day or break my legs on that day after my surgery was because i knew it would not stop the pain. the days when nothing seemed to get better I honestly thought "so this is what getting really old and sick is like. no wonder old people are like 'i'm ready to go'"

it is such an impossible thought to have at 22 and yet I have had it.

wow what six year old doesnt understand death?  isn't this something parents explain?  i vividly remember being 3 when my mom explained CONCEPT OF DEATH to me and being horrified beyond words.  six seems old not to get it!

did you really get the concept of NEVER WAKE UP AGAIN though.

also by the concept of death i mean THEY ARE GOING TO DIE AND PROBABLY VERY PAINFULLY. most people do not grasp this concept until the day they die, let alone children.

WELCOME TO THE WORST TOPIC YOU'LL READ! I'll stop this no one needs to think about PAIN ON THE LEVEL YOU WANT TO DIE really and if they do I should devote more thought to it than "BABBY NO FEEL PAIN!!!"

not the best site but this is pretty much spot on: http://www.hospicenet.org/html/understand.html

i mean im not sure most people make it to old age worldwide so yeah i think its probably pretty fuckin painful overall.

I could fathom wanting to die or not wanting to live anymore but I can't fathom the pain. Like when my grandma was going I could see how fucking painful it was but I couldn't really get a grasp of it, she was groaning the entire time and someone told me it was just her lungs kind of forcing air out because of the pain or something like that it sounds really really awful and to imagine she wasn't even consciously doing it.

just think steel years from now whenever someone's complaining of a headache or dislocated hip or whatever you can be like "hey, i had high levels of poison pumped through my body, and then after i was done with that had my head cut open and then even HIGHER levels of poison pumped through my body which destroyed my bone marrow, stop bitching."

"Some bitch put staples in my head"

Pull through, steel.