f13.net forums - So, a doctor may have just killed my grandfather.

My grandfather has (or had, I guess it's pretty cured now) Hodgkin's disease, a cancer that makes white blood cells go apeshit. My grandparents go to Florida for a few months at the beginning of every year, so his doctor made arrangements for him to continue getting his chemo down there, a thrice-weekly dose to keep the white blood cell count under control.

The rocket scientists in Florida promptly gave him too much juice, killing all of his white blood cells, all of his bone marrow, and consequently all of his immune system. Oops. At this point, he's in the same boat as the bubble boy, where pretty much any disease on the planet will be fatal for him, and it's pretty inevitable that in the next week or two he'll eventually run across a stray virus or bacterium and that'll be that. He's coming back up now to see his usual, competent doctor and find out whether something can be pulled off for a last-minute save of the situation, but things aren't looking optimistic at the moment.

So, in the off chance that there are any immune system specialists in the audience, I'm throwing this out here to solicit advice. If anyone happens to have knowledge of an obscure super-awesome-quick-fix-for-no-marrow technique, I'd really like to know it. The usual marrow transplant technique will take longer to find a donor match than he'll likely survive, so the most common method is right out. At this point, we really have nothing to lose, so crazy treatments likely to kill him are worth considering too; those odds are still better than the lack of marrow's guaranteed killing of him.

And because it's bound to be mentioned, no, we're not likely to go after the doctor who did this. My grandfather's old and had cancer and chemo's a bit dicey on the best of days, so all of those factors together mean that even if we went completely overboard on the hospital for the doctor's bungling the treatment, it'd be unlikely that anyone would care. Ironically, if the hospital had, say, destroyed his car, my grandfather would be on them like a bulldog until they were begging for mercy, but when they fuck up and give him a lethal dose of chemo, they pretty much get away with it.