Rolling with the Punches: Jenny’s Journey through Two Bone Marrow Transplants and Beyond
Jenny Nixon is no slouch. She’s a mother to two sets of twins, who she raised as a single mum from when they were six and three years old, and is a proud grandmother to four. She runs her own baking business, and is the self-professed ‘Queen of Melting Moments’ in Wagga Wagga. She is […]
Diamond-Blackfan Anaemia, and Poppy’s fight for life.
Poppy Pickett has had more than a lifetime’s worth of medical poking and prodding, with transfusion after transfusion, endless visits to hospitals and specialists, and months in isolation. And she’s only five years old. Poppy was diagnosed with Diamond-Blackfan Anaemia (DBA) just six weeks after she was born. DBA is a rare disease in which […]
Living with long-term GvHD – Serina’s story
Thursday 7th November 2002 is a day Serina Dosen will never forget. It’s the day she received her new stem cells, and a second chance at life. But it’s also the day she began her “new normal” life, with a body that requires more care than most. Serina is living with long-term GvHD. “Looking after […]
Hidden financial cost of BMT
Meagan Clark* is a university lecturer, married, with two kids – all the usual stuff – and considers herself incredibly privileged. But despite her apparent advantages in life, she still struggled with the blows dealt to her and her family during her cancer treatment. Meagan’s story About 5 or 6 years ago, I was diagnosed […]
Stacey’s Story: A Mother’s Journey through Andre’s GATA2 Deficiency and Transplant
GATA2. It sounds like something from a SciFi movie, doesn’t it? Perhaps the name of a newly colonised planet, or a space station or something. But no. It’s a protein that regulates gene expression and it plays a key role in the production of your blood cells. And, like young Andre, you can be deficient […]
Living with Multiple Myeloma – Aamu’s story
You don’t expect to have to wear nappies and learn to walk again when you’ve been successfully adulting for decades. And you don’t expect to follow that up with having to watch your 19-year-old learn to walk again either. But that’s what happened to Aamu. It all began with chronic back pain with no apparent […]
Anne’s gift in memory of Katherine Robertson
Katherine Robertson, pictured in 1999, not long before her diagnosis with acute lymphocytic leukaemia. Anne Robertson Anne Robertson was a refined lady, always impeccably presented, with a love for history and family. Anne had a love of the arts enjoying the theatre, Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and she spent much time travelling around UK and […]
Bedside Nursing Degree for Courtney Hughes!
Courtney Hughes’ pathway to her nursing career is not your average one, but then Courtney probably isn’t your average kind of girl. Courtney was leading an active life, busy working as a prison officer doing lots of physically demanding work leading bush regeneration projects with crews of inmates, and on top of that doing Crossfit […]
BMT for Crohn’s Disease – The worst and the best time of my life
“My bone marrow transplant was the worst and the best time of my life.” That’s how Jordan Lambropoulos describes her ground-breaking stem cell transplant now that she has another year of living under her belt. Bone marrow or stem cell transplants are nothing new, so what makes Jordy’s transplant so ground-breaking? Well, as far as […]
Sam Sheehan and Aplastic Anaemia
Meet Sam Sheehan, an Aussie living and working in Vietnam with his partner. Sam, with his ever-positive outlook on life, put a lot of his seemingly innocent health woes down to travel bugs and a difference in health care systems, but as one symptom lead to another, Sam started to come to the realization that […]
Patient Webinars: Transplant Talk LIVE!!
Arrow’s newsletter, “Transplant Talk” is going live. Join us for a series of patient webinars with expert guests covering topics such as returning to work after bone marrow/stem cell transplant, survivorship, dealing with graft v. host disease, and much more. These webinars will give us an opportunity to dive a little deeper into the topics […]
Jackie’s cat saved her life. (Oh, and an allogeneic stem cell transplant.)
A woman with a cat bite walks into a medical centre… No, it’s not the start of a bad joke, but what followed for Jackie was so surreal it felt like it could have been. She had been feeling fatigued and lethargic for a while, but it wasn’t until a routine blood test after she […]