[mausmish]

Hi Beth,

Sorry to hear you and your husband are going through this. I am an MDS survivor. This forum is a great place to be for information and support and Neil has provided you with an excellent resource as a starting point. MDS is a different beast. For example, it is not "staged" like solid tumor cancers so "stage 4" is a misnomer. It is instead classified as low, medium, or high risk based on a number of factors such as chromosomal anomalies, cytopenias, and number of blasts (immature blood cells). It is often tempting to contemplate the "what if's" regarding causes and timing of diagnoses but it's best to move forward and look ahead. My hematologist gave me good advice, "You may never know why - sometimes it just comes down to bad luck. And it probably wouldn't have made a difference if you'd been diagnosed sooner." There's another good informational booklet from the lymphoma and leukemia society, here in pdf form, http://www.lls.org/content/nationalcontent/resourcecenter/freeeducationmaterials/mds/pdf/mds.pdf.

If you post questions here in the forums, you'll almost always get a variety of useful answers from other patients and caregivers based on their own research and personal experiences.

Try to stay positive and keep your sense of humor! ET is one of my old favorite movies :-)

Wishing you the best.

Karen