debutaunt.com

A black and blue mess

Still uninsured. Still a mess.

Still have weird scar tissue on my lower back. I think it is in the spot where they do my left bone marrow biopsies. I've lost so much weight you can actually see it poking up.

I am bruising like crazy too. It worries me a little bit because that is a symptom of leukemia. I have a five inch bruise on my stomach. I took a picture but it looked too gross to post.

I was sort of glad to read about the marrow foundation running out of funding. That means many people responded.

Pretty remarkable story!! Doctors say marrow transplant may have cured AIDS.

BERLIN - An American man who suffered from AIDS appears to have been cured of the disease 20 months after receiving a targeted bone marrow transplant normally used to fight leukemia, his doctors said.

While researchers — and the doctors themselves — caution that the case might be no more than a fluke, others say it may inspire a greater interest in gene therapy to fight the disease that claims 2 million lives each year. The virus has infected 33 million people worldwide.

Dr. Gero Huetter said Wedneday his 42-year-old patient, an American living in Berlin who was not identified, had been infected with the AIDS virus for more than a decade. But 20 months after undergoing a transplant of genetically selected bone marrow, he no longer shows signs of carrying the virus.

"We waited every day for a bad reading," Huetter said.

It has not come. Researchers at Berlin's Charite hospital and medical school say tests on his bone marrow, blood and other organ tissues have all been clean.

However, Dr. Andrew Badley, director of the HIV and immunology research lab at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., said those tests have probably not been extensive enough.

"A lot more scrutiny from a lot of different biological samples would be required to say it's not present," Badley said.

Posted by debutaunt at November 13, 2008 04:28 PM