Nine months after my CAR T cell therapy, I relapsed. We tried to do another infusion of CAR T to see if maybe that would get me back into remission and ready for a bone marrow transplant, but sadly, it didn’t do much. We decided to continue with the transplant, and I received the transplant from my younger brother. We were a 100 percent match!
I received the transplant on May 13, 2025. Everything went well with the transplant. I was only at the hospital for three and a half weeks, which my doctors said was a pretty short stay for what I had just had done. A month after the transplant, I noticed a mass on my left cheek, so we got a biopsy done to see what it could be. We found out the mass on my check was leukemia cells just sitting there.
Getting this news just made me feel numb. I was just in disbelief. My doctors reassured me that I’m going to be okay, and we will figure this out. I started chemo again, and I did 10 rounds of radiation on my face to get rid of the mass, which, thank God, we were able to do. After the radiation, I got an infusion of DLSI. A couple of days after receiving this, I started to feel really sick, so I got admitted to the oncology floor at Loma Linda University Health. I spent over two and a half weeks there, where I was dealing with GVHD.
My skin and liver were doing really poorly, but during this admission, I got a biopsy done to see where we were after all the treatment I had undergone. We had good news, both my biopsies showed that I had no leukemia in my body, I was back in remission!!! I was told this on September 17. So far, everything has been going smoothly. It's just time to recover and get stronger each day.
Ruben
leukemia
