In memoriam: Emru Townsend

[jaderabbit]

Technology and animation journalist/editor Emru Townsend died last night. Although he was lucky enough to get a bone marrow transplant for his Monosomy 7--and his site HealEmru.com has doubtlessly helped many others to get the marrow they need--his transplant did not cure the disease.

I knew Emru only a little bit, completely through e-mail. From

Comments

[clair_de_lalune]

Of course, everyone has to decide for themselves whether the risks and benefits are worthwhile, so I wouldn't presume to counsel someone who had a good understanding of the risk to benefit ratio against having a certain type of bone marrow or peripheral blood stem cell transplant just because of my own feelings.* But, I am in a very good position to understand the risks and benefits, having spent several months on the BMT service during my hematology-oncology fellowship training 1999-2002. Where I did my training, matched unrelated donor transplants or 4/6 & 5/6 partial matches were the most common performed. My previous comment was based on my experiences with these patients, understanding that a graft versus leukemia effect is desirable to improve the chances of curing the cancer. My feeling was that the cure was worse than the disease; however, it's possible that the patients I saw were doing particularly badly because they were hospitalized and that there were many more patients in the outpatient setting who were doing well. Since outpatient BMT wasn't part of my training, I wouldn't know.

*I almost always refrain from telling people what I would do in their positions because I'm not them. But, at any rate, transplant isn't an option for the type of cancer I now treat, except in clinical trials.

[clair_de_lalune]

In speaking of the outpatient setting I don't mean to imply that any of these transplants were performed in the clinic, but that I wouldn't have seen patients who had completed their transplants and were months-years out from their treatments, doing well, and following up in the clinic.