Hi
I’ve got Myeloma which was diagnosed early this year. After 6 months of chemo (that didn’t work) I’m now on immunotherapy and it’s actually working- yippee! I’m now pencilled in for stem cell therapy in November or December but my consultant says he wants to see the cancer markers dropping as much as possible before I start the harvesting and subsequent transfusion.
my question is how much must the markers drop for SCT to get me to remission? At the moment the paraprotiens and free light chains still have relatively high numbers.. I wondered if others had Experience of this? Surely the markers don’t have to get to “normal” levels?
many thanks, sorry if this is a bit of a technical enquiry!
Hi NickyJ and welcome to this corner of the Community but sorry to hear that you are on the pathway to SCT….. although I can testify that SCT saved my life.
I had 2 Allo (donor) SCTs (June 2014 then Oct 2015…… It actually was my 8th re-birthday yesterday ;))
I have a very rare skin NHL so I could never be put into full remission so Auto (own cells) SCT was not possible as I could not produce clean Stem Cells to be harvested.
I honestly don’t have an answer for your question but for an Auto to work your Stem Cells need to be cancer free but let’s look for any Myeloma group members to pick up on your post.
You could put your question to our Cancer Nurse Team in our Ask an Expert section but do allow a few working days for a reply.
We had a great day including cake
As an encouragement m, I went into both my Allo SCTs with active cancer cells as there was no way to get me in remission.
