Did you manage to catch the BBC programme “War in the blood”? If you didn’t and you have any interest in how science is progressing then I recommend it as an interesting watch. It will also give you some insight to what parts of my life have been like fighting this disease!
It took me a few days to build up the courage to watch the programme. I’m on a few different blood cancer forums and heard several emotional reviews, but curiosity got the better of me and I decided to give it a watch. In some ways I’m glad I did, in other ways ignorance was bliss!
The programme follows the journey of two patients on trials for the new(ish – this was filmed in 2017) CAR T- cell therapy. CAR T-cell therapy is a treatment “described as being the beginning of the end of cancer”. Its a really clever immunotherapy treatment that essentially rewires your immune system to identify and destroy cancer cells, without the same level of overall destruction as chemotherapy. (They explain it more eloquently in the programme). At the moment I beleive the therapy is available for acute lymphobastic leukaemia patients and is just beginning further trials for acute myeloid leukaemia (AML – my strain of blood cancer).
Watching the programme was hard going for me. I’m in a very similar situation to both Graham and Mahmoud in that I have tried pretty much all options to fight my cancer. Luckily my cancer seems repsonsive to chemo, to be able to get me into remisison even if it is only medium term, BUT all the specialists agree that my cancer WILL come back. Maybe in 6 months – 2 years – 10 years, who knows, but it will come back. The one thing we are hoping for is that research has progressed in that time and the immunotherapy drugs will be available for me to try.
The tough watches in this programme for me were
a) Watching the patients suffering throughout the treatment brought back lots of flashbacks to my previous hospital stays and some unwanted memories
b) Watching the patients suffer the side effects is like a glimpse into the future of what the treatment could be like for me
c) That the treatment might not be the wonder drug I’ve been waiting for. It might not kill off all my cancer, or it might and it might still manage to grow back again. It kind of crushed my hopes!
So all in all I haven’t been feeling too cheery about things the first few days after watching it – however, a few days on I’ve been able to further reflect on things. Thinking about how much medicine has progressed in the time I’ve been ill. When I was first diagnosed in 2004 a transplant was considered far far too risky for me, yet here I am 15 years later having survived two transplants (and various other treatments) all due to the progress of medicine in that time. So I’m going to try and claim back some of my hope, and put my faith in the scientists and also say many thanks to people like Graham and Mahmoud who put themselves out there on these trials so that science can learn and improve treatments for everyone.
Emma's fight against MDS 