Pinning down the problem.

Being from Seattle, one would think I would be familiar with a medical institution as large as the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance (near the REI flagship store on the west side of I-5).  This place is huge with numerous buildings and walk-in clinics.   Anyone who is experiencing cancer in the NW has probably be introduced to this place.  There is a close connection between the UW Hospital, Harbor View County Hospital, Children's Orthopedic Hospital and the SCCA.  The medical records from these institutions are shared and can be accessed from any of the locations.  We arrived for our appointment to join those who were coming in for a blood draw before the clinical visit.  There were people with various stages of cancer.   No one seemed shy about the fact that they had lost all their hair from chemotherapy or were now very weak due to their sickness.  For Rose, the visit reminded her of the days her father was undergoing cancer treatment.  Eventually the cancer took his life.  This became one more sobering event that we were not dealing with a garden variety of heart failure.  While no one has said the amyloid is a cancer, it is very close in how it behaves and multiplies.  Our appointment was with a Dr. Shustov, a hematologist from the Ukraine.  He has an interests in amyloid proteins and how they can be treated.  His intern, who we saw first was a Dr. Shenoi from India.  He came into our appointment with both guns blazing.  It was hard to follow with his thick accent and very technical  presentation.  (I had college Microbiology over thirty years ago.  I was following about 10 percent of what he was telling us).  The bottom line was the form of amyloid I had could be treated with a bone marrow replacement.   Lab results seemed to indicate I have the form that was caused, not from heredity, but from a mutation that occurred in the bone marrow.  The bone marrow work would start sometime after the new heart was in place.  The replacement for the bone marrow would come from my own T-cells that would be harvested and frozen after the heart was replaced.   I would become my own donor for the bone marrow work.  This was all good news.  

At this point, I had not been accepted by the UW as a transplant candidate or put on a list yet.  This was the next hurdle.