Last week I returned home after spending 16 days hospitalized in the Moffitt Cancer Center’s Bone Marrow Transplant (BMT) Treatment Unit, followed by seven days as an outpatient.

I wanted to wait a week until I felt better and gained some perspective before I shared details with you about my experience undergoing a stem cell transplant as treatment for my relapsed multiple myeloma.

But as it turns out, I’m not the story.  The story is the dozens of fellow stem cell transplant patients I met along the way.

Some of them were recovering from an autologous transplant like mine.   An autologous, or auto, transplant is where someone receives his or her own previously harvested stem cells back after undergoing two days of high dose chemotherapy.

It didn’t take me long to figure out those of us who underwent an auto transplant were the lucky ones.  Sure, most of us battled a number of different serious side effects, including nausea, diarrhea, loss of appetite, mucositis (mouth sores), dehydration, fatigue, and hair loss.

But those who underwent allogeneic, or donor transplants, were the ones fighting a much more serious battle. An allogeneic, or allo, transplant is where someone undergoes high-dose chemotherapy and then receives stem cells from a matched donor.

Many more types of serious complications can arise from this type of transplant, including pneumonia and graft-versus-host disease, in which the donor cells recognize the patient’s cells as foreign and attack them. Additionally, this procedure often includes post-transplant chemotherapy, making the process a lot more complicated and difficult to endure.

I could hear the struggles as I walked up and down the halls of my unit—people coughing and moaning.

I saw it in the scared and concerned faces of family members and caregivers.  I was out of there in 16 days.  Donor transplant recipients stayed confined to the unit, on average, over twice that long.

Auto or allo, everyone was expected to walk several times each day.  It was during my daily walks that I had the chance to meet a number of my fellow patients.

I can’t find the words to express how brave my fellow transplant patients are.  Brave and determined.  Just thinking about our time together brings tears to my eyes.

Sure, I had my share of bad days when I was nauseous and really sick.  But I can only hope my new friends in the BMT Treatment Unit make it through as easily as I did.

Feel good and keep smiling!  Pat