DISEASE

Blood cancer is a serious disease. It could have happened to you, it could have happened to anybody of your nearest and dearest. We are lucky. Somebody isn’t. There is only one reason for this disease: an all-embracing chaos. The bone marrow stumbles, goes wrong and starts to produce white blood corpuscles with a wrong code. They don’t fulfill their functions but they multiply at a high rate. It’s as difficult to say why this mistake happened as why it didn’t fail before. It’s just an accident: somebody was lucky and somebody (one of 50,000) was not.

The one who wasn’t lucky soon becomes weak, falls ill with some attendant illnesses (something like tonsillitis or influenza). This is unpleasant but nobody thinks about frightening things: «It's nothing, just quinsy… that happens to everyone…». It’s impossible to believe that it is you on whom a brick will fall down. It’s hard to imagine.

As a rule the attendant illnesses make people visit a doctor. A skillful doctor will send his patient to make a blood test and the blood cancer will be revealed. But if the test isn’t made the number of illnesses will grow and the symptoms will become more and more worrying. An unskillful doctor may start treating the attendant illnesses and in that time the blasts (these «wrong» blood cells) will fill the organism. Sometimes the disease is revealed too late. They say: «Cancer killed a person in four days» but it isn’t so. The patient was ill for a long time but nobody noticed it; we know that it is extremely important to be attentive.

Despite the widespread delusion, blood cancer can’t be cured by a complete blood transfusion: the donor's blood grows old very fast and is replaced through the blood creation process of the patient. Since the bone marrow produces new «wrong» cells, very quickly the situation will return as it was before the transfusion. But blood transfusions may still be necessary because during the disease and treatment the bone marrow works badly and new cells are created slowly. This causes the sick man’s immune system to basically disappear: wounds aren’t healed, any touch may cause bruises, any rough movement may bring about a haemorrhage. That's why, if the condition of the blood is bad, the doctors prescribe a blood transfusion. Unfortunately, these procedures can’t influence seriously the process of recovering but still they make the patient’s condition more stable.
In fact a patient with a too low level of red blood corpuscles isn’t even allowed to get out of bed, to watch TV and to read books: «What if the eyes blood vessels burst and the retina exfoliates?» anything could happen. After a transfusion of red blood corpuscles the patient is safer.

The treatment of blood cancer looks strange and even as cruel as a medieval one. Roughly speaking, the treatment consists in killing the patient’s blood creating system so that cells cannot multiply and blasts stop developing. The chemotherapy is a severe beating of the cells which are able to divide. Hairs also consist of such cells, therefore hair drops.
When the chemotherapy is over the process of blood creation tries to resume its work. As normal (non-modified) cells are stronger than mutant blasts there is a hope that they will be restored and that the blast won’t be. But one can’t be sure that the bone marrow has realized his mistake and will produce only healthy cells once and forever. The bone marrow might conserve his delusions. That is why, to be on the safe side, the doctors prescribe chemotherapy again and again: this makes the bone marrow obey for some time.

There are various types of blood cancer. Some of them don’t repeat too often and that's why they are treated only with chemotherapy. Some of them though are beyond chemotherapy: the bone marrow may behave well only for some time but later it forgets about everything and restarts to work «wrong». Success depends on the age of the bone marrow and on the type of blasts it has started to produce (for example, b-leucocytes or t-leucocytes); also, the success depends on the seriousness of the error. All these are risk factors. A child’s bone marrow is more obedient and agrees that it has been wrong. A child in remission (remission is the so-called recovery from blood cancer, when it is still unknown if it will return or not) often grows up and the disease never comes back (unfortunately, not all children are so lucky). That is why an age greater than 18 is one of the risk factors.
Yet the type of blast-cells which used to be produced by the bone marrow is more important. The older the cells were, the more chances that the disease will return: the error isn’t so simple to forget about. This is the second risk factor.
The third factor is the seriousness of the attendant illnesses at the time the disease was revealed. If blasts have spread the disease won't only be in the blood creating system but also in the nervous system, where their own processes of multiplication of «wrong» cells have already begun; this situation is more dangerous. The cells in the nervous system are like gangsters who have moved to another state where they obey the local laws but the law can show some indulgence. Therefore, it isn’t easy to make them obey.

Generally speaking, the more factors the less chances that the repressive chemotherapy will teach a crazy bone marrow to work in the proper way. That’s why often doctors decide to change the spoilt bone marrow with a new one. It seems to be a simple and wise decision. What can be simpler… A transplanted bone marrow  fights against blood cancer. But actually transplantation turns out to be not less dangerous than the disease itself. First, for transplantation it is necessary to kill the bone marrow with chemicals; but without bone marrow a person may die even from a light infection. Also, a new bone marrow may be naughty in its own way and it can start to produce cells that will kill all of the patient's organs one by one.  This reaction is called "graft-versus-host disease and it can’t be avoided. Sometimes it can be regulated but sometimes it may go out of control and in this case it’s impossible to save the patient.
That is why transplantation is always a threatening operation. It’s extremely important to take into consideration millions of factors and to take every precaution. There should be all the necessary instruments which may be useful if something goes wrong. The adoption of a new bone marrow is a long-lasting process. It takes about 100 days and anything may happen during these days.

In this country the conditions are only nearing the necessary standards. That’s why transplantation in this country is quite a risky thing to do. Therefore, we are searching for money to operate the patient in Israel We want to male our chances higher. There are only few of them. We want Lesha to live. In spite of the all-embracing chaos. We want him to be in the list of the long living people of this planet.