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Paul,
Thank you for telling us about your experience. I'm hope it didn't take you long to realize that MDS isn't caused by bad habits that would leave someone with the blame. The anger you felt or still feel is perfectly understandable, but you shouldn't feel guilty about your mother's illness.
Even though the onset of a diagnosable condition was fast in your mother's case, her childhood anemia is a clue that she was living with a bone marrow deficiency for most of her life. When the symptoms became severe enough she finally learned what was wrong and got the MDS-RAEB-2 diagnosis, on its way to AML.
Your mother should have had better care from the medical staff when she had an allergic reaction to a platelet transfusion. It's a common problem, there are ways to deal with it, and it's not dangerous to others. Unfortunately, caregivers (like me) rarely have much medical knowledge when their family member gets sick, and we often learn more in hindsight that we can learn in advance. It's a shame that patients should ever have to keep an eye out for poor patient care.
Even when one family's ordeal is over, another family's ordeal is just beginning, so like you I'm hoping that new research will lead to a cure, to better and better treatments, to faster recognition of the symptoms, to more knowledge about the causes, and eventually to an end to all forms of bone marrow failure disease.
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