[dfantle]

Paul and Carol, wishing you both all the best with your transplants. I'm 2 1/2 years post transplant & doing great. My transplant was non-myeloablative using stem cells from a matched unrelated donor., so I know this can be quite different from the myeloablative transplant. Mine went fairly smoothly, and other than really minor oral GVHD at 3 months, I really had no other GVHD issues until about one year post when I was mostly off my immunosuppression medication, and then mild.

The experience is different for everybody & truly the most important things to remember are to follow all your teams "rules" & to do your best to stay healthy while you're immunosuppressed. I strictly limited visitors, and really tried to do hands-free for pretty much everything using either gloves or paper towels to open or close doors or turn on faucets etc.(yes, even in my hospital room) & encouraged any visitors to do the same & use hand sanitizer whenever they entered my home or room. And when you return home to follow all the safety precautions for bleaching counters checking food temperatures etc.

I also never shook hands with anybody including the physicians - regardless of whether they just washed their hands. It may have seemed to be a little bit overkill, and I wasn't freaky about it I just didn't do it. I truly think these precautions helped me stay fully healthy while I was the most immunosuppressed. In fact I didn't even have a cold until 11 months post transplant, even though I did start eating out (being careful & following the rules) and was out in public starting at about four months post fairly regularly. Like me, you'll probably develop a sixth cense of really being aware when people around you wherever you are have cold or flu symptoms and be able to avoid them like I did.