The BMT

BMT stands for Bone Marrow Transplant.

While I was admitted for the bad reaction I had from the chemo last time, I had my consultation with the BMT team, as well as attended the BMT class--everyone who's going for a transplant needs to do this.
The class was informative but nothing I didn't already know, as originally a donor match was tried to be found for me before, back in 2013, and the doctor in charge of that was really, brutally honest about all the things that go oh-so-dreadfully wrong with the transplant. These aren't the types of things you ever forget hearing about (and not to mention, I've been re-reading up on the whole BMT thing again all these years later now that I know I need one for sure), so really, not much I heard in the class was news to me.

What sucked was the BMT consultation itself. See, a few weeks ago (the day I was discharged from my second induction, actually), I was told that not one, but TWO donor matches were found for me. I was so shocked that they were found so quickly, because when they tried to find one back in 2013, it took them over a year to find any match at all, and when they did, it was only a 8/10* match; too risky, so they decided not to go with it (especially as I had already been in remission for so long, so the risks outweighed the benefits at that point). Well, now they had found me two matches in just a few months' time, and they were both 9/10s. I was pretty damn excited (needless to say), especially since this time it's CRUCIAL I get the transplant done.

Fastforward to a few weeks later, when we have the consultation, and the doctor tells me that the odds are pretty much against me here--that my donor matches aren't so good. I was pretty shocked to hear that (to put it mildly). Now, I know a 9/10 isn't fantastic--I know even with a 10/10, there are a TON of risks involved and there's no guarantee things will work out, so a 9/10 is even less likely to work in the patient's favour--but to say the matches weren't that great? Really?
He went on to tell me that an important antigen-marker was missing--with BOTH donors. It was my choice if I wanted to wait around for them to see if they could find a better match, but he highly recommended against doing that, as he had no idea how long that would take, and in the meantime, I could relapse again. My chances of relapsing again are high (as it's already happened once), and if I do relapse again, it would be disastrous for a number of reasons, so it's much better to take the chance and go with one of the not-so-good donors we have (he said he's choosing the younger one).

I don't have the date for my transplant yet, but in the meantime I have to undergo and pass like, a thousand different kind of physical tests. Oh, and probably go for MORE consolidation chemotherapy, so that I don't relapse in the meantime. What fun!

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*The matches (out of 10) are how many antigen-markers are the same as yours...or something like that. I don't quite understand it myself. My doctor explained to me quite well, illustrating it on paper, but I can't remember anymore. It's some complicated DNA shit.