MARGARET'S STORY

The last few years have been an emotional rollercoaster for all the family. Towards the end of February 2009, Margaret was diagnosed with a particularly nasty form of Acute Myeloid Leukaemia. All the way through her treatment she was determined to beat it, not least for the sake of our son Peter who was two and a half at the time she was diagnosed.

To start with, things went better than we might have hoped. After the first cycle of chemotherapy she was in remission, and the following cycles didn't make her feel too sick. Because of the particular type of AML involved, it was decided to finish with a stem cell transplant. Luckily her brother Robert (a.k.a. James or Jim outside the family) was a matching tissue type, so able to act as the donor. After each stage of treatment her blood counts had been recovering a bit faster than average, and she regained her strength so quickly after the transplant that within two or three months she was walking a few miles a couple of times a week taking Peter to and from nursery.

And then in November '09, just as she finally came completely off the anti-rejection drugs, we discovered she'd had a relapse of the leukaemia. Basically it had come back too quickly, before the transplant had a chance to attack it. So over that Christmas and new year holiday Margaret was back in hospital again, for high intensity chemotherapy to try and get her back into remission, followed by a second transplant with the intention to speed things along post-transplant to provoke the desired graft-versus-leukaemia effects before she relapsed again. This was always going to be a risky procedure, and her chances weren't great, but we tried to keep positive and hopeful since she'd remained strong and determined through the treatments so far. Indeed, she got through these last treatments without feeling too ill, and returned home in late January.

A week after being discharged she fell ill with a gastric viral infection and was again admitted into hospital in order to treat that. Even after the virus had gone from her body, the symptoms persisted as she had developed graft-versus-host disease. This progressed to attack her liver, and was so severe that her condition went downhill rapidly. Unfortunately, it failed to respond to treatment and on 24th February 2010 she died. She was comfortable and peaceful at the end, and both I and Robert were with her.

Throughout her treatment, Margaret was happy and willing to take part in research. Before starting the first round of chemotherapy, samples of the leukaemic cells were collected for a research study - "they can take as much as they want, the more they collect the less the chemo has to deal with". She took part in a breath sample study, investigating whether fungal infections can be diagnosed sooner or more accurately based on the presence of fungal proteins in the exhaled breath. Even after the relapse the salvage chemotherapy and second stem cell transplant were done as part of a phase two clinical trial hoping to confirm promising results from earlier research that showed an improvement in long term outcomes from varying the timings of the treatment. All the way through, Margaret felt that if there was anything she could do that might improve the situation of others suffering from AML, then even if things went badly for her at least some good could come from it. For this reason we know she would approve of us asking for any donations in her memory to go to Leukaemia Research, in the hope that one day nobody else might have to go through what we have.