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Old Thu Feb 27, 2014, 03:54 PM
Neil Cuadra Neil Cuadra is offline
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Join Date: Jul 2006
Location: Los Angeles, California
Posts: 2,553
Ann G,

I understand how hard this is for you. I hope we can help you process what's happened. I'm sorry you lost your mother and that it happened so quickly without leaving you time to understand all that was going on. I also hope that you and the doctors can identify what went wrong for your mother.

Mortality from MDS isn't directly from the disease but from the symptoms it causes. People with MDS can't produce proper numbers of working blood cells, so they can be infection-prone, anemic, and/or at risk of bleeding. This can range from mild to life-threatening. Side effects from MDS treatments can put patients in further danger. But none of this explains what happened to your mother.

The most common cause of death is from infections, but your mother apparently didn't have one. Fevers not directly related to infections can be associated with leukemia and other cancers, and what they call "fevers of unknown origin" are unfortunately common.

Neither "chromosome involvement" nor 6% blasts is a direct risk. Faulty chromosomes are simply part of the mechanism that leaves people with reduced blood counts. Statistically that means a higher long-term risk, but it's not an imminent danger. Blasts (immature blood cells) can range up to 5% in a healthy person, and RAEB stands for "Refractory Anemia with Excess Blasts", so 6% is at the low end of the "excess" scale.

Did your mother have other significant health problems? Did they evaluate her heart condition? Her low hemoglobin (in between transfusions) might have been putting too high a strain on her system.
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