Perhaps the greatest emotional problems from a blood cancer diagnosis arise from uncertainty. Often that uncertainty can precede a diagnosis, for months and sometimes years,

Autumn, the leaves are falling. The intense heat of the summer has faded, the rain has come at last, and the landscape is green once

By a strange coincidence, on the first anniversary of when I was admitted to Pinderfields Hospital with a nosebleed that was the first indication that

Here we are, 19 weeks from the transplant, 15 weeks since I came home. In my last blog I wrote about how I was advised,

I arrived home last Wednesday, with a bag of medications. Rather than do a daily blog, which felt appropriate in the hospital, I will update

Day +15 The last two weeks have been tough. I knew of most of the risks of an STC, but had no idea how that

Now for the tricky bit. The donor cells are in there, and they should find their way into the bone marrow where they will mature

My daughter explained to my grandson, now just turned 8, that the reason people have had to be careful with me of late and why

Here I am, just four months after the referral to St James’s, admitted for a stem cell transplant. In preparation we isolated (my wife and

Yesterday I met with the team at St James in Leeds, and the transplant process is scheduled to start on the 8th April, just a

After our initial meeting with the transplant consultant mid December, things went quiet for some time. We were aware it would take over six weeks

It’s very easy to get sucked into the numbers that are shared in relation to MDS. As a mathematician who worked in healthcare informatics for

Most people I know are aware that I was diagnosed with MDS last year. I was offered a stem cell transplant in December if a donor

It is challenging to have a cancer diagnosis, but … I wasn’t desperately shocked by the initial diagnosis of MDS, though I had a real

Last Friday I got a call to say that a fully matched, unrelated stem-cell donor has been found and is willing to donate stem cells.

I was anything but a fitness junkie, but I was very active before my MDS diagnosis. My wife and I went ballroom and sequence dancing

A diagnosis like MDS will trigger many emotions, for you and for everyone who knows you and hears. Here I will comment primarily on my

A stem cell transplant is a treatment that is used in many blood cancers, and is often the only cure (as with MDS). About 4,000

On the Monday following my discharge from Pinderfields we (my wife and I) arrived at the Cavell unit at Dewsbury hospital. There was a small

On 9th September 2025 I started with a nosebleed, something not unusual as I was recovering from a bad cold, but this time it continued

MDS is short for Myelodysplastic Syndrome. It is a rare form of blood cancer caused by a change in some of the stem cells in