Welcome to our CaringBridge website. We are setting this site up because Troy does not really use social media (except Twitter for Gator football news!) and he doesn't have a Facebook or Instagram account. Given the difficulty of always responding to all texts and well wishes as well as communicating progress, we thought this may be a nice way to do it through these next three months. We'll see.
For those of you that do not know all the details of my story, we found out in mid to late March that Troy acquired an aggressive and rare form of a blood cancer, T Cell Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (T-ALL). To make matters more confusing, Troy's disease presented itself more as a lymphoma since there was no disease in his bone marrow and he only had masses in my chest. So, technically he has T Cell Lymphoblastic Lymphoma (T-LBL), but the docs tell us it's semantics since the treatment plan and prognosis is pretty much the same for T-ALL and T-LBL. He is being treated at Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa.
Since late March, Troy has successfully completed six rounds of chemotherapy they call HYPERCVAD, which is the preferred frontline treatment for ALL. He has been in remission since early May, but that does not mean we are done. Since ALL has an aggressive relapse rate (especially in the first two years), the doctors here at Moffitt strongly recommend patients have a stem cell transplant after they reach remission. The data suggests that the transplant provides the best chances of kicking ALL for good. We won't bore you with all the details of the procedure but any one interested here is the link to a brief description of what is involved in an Allogenic Stem Cell Transplant (
https://www.lls.org/treatment/types-of-treatment/stem-cell-transplantation/allogeneic-stem-cell-transplantation).
We were fortunate to find a 27 year old (thus the reason for the title of the site), full match male donor, and it sounds like he is in Europe. We were admitted into the hospital to start the process on August 26th and Troy started the first day of chemotherapy the same day. He will receive the donors stem cells on August 31st. We are expected to be in the hospital for 20 - 30 days, and then we have to stay in a local Tampa apartment for another 2.5 to 3 months.
We can't say enough in words how grateful we all of all the well wishes, prayers, and assistance we've received to date from friends and family. We are confident that it's one of the big reasons this has been going so well since the diagnosis.
We look forward to seeing everyone again when this all behind of us!
Love and thanks,
Troy and Ali
