Disease

The medical community needs to stop doing stem cell transplants until they can figure out the aftermath. This is from the mother of a 10 year old boy. He had a stem cell transplant, and now has skin GVHD, scleroderma like GVHD, lung GVHD. He had his transplant at 5, and for 5 years he has struggled with one complication after another. His life is his disease.

After another long day at Clinic Monday
getting platelets & IVIG
and having to cancel OT & PT because getting the blood products took so long
that Ryan's therapy times came & went
while he was still hooked up to IVs
Ryan quietly sat at our dinner table after school
with the most down trodden expression on his face.

I asked him what was wrong.
He just shook his head.
Then he whispered, "It just isn't worth it."
He turned his hands over as much as he could to show me
where another huge blood blister had pooled the night before while he slept.
His eyes were vacant and he just looked down.