#25 Dazzling
When you read the word chimera you may or may not recall your Greek mythology. From Wikipedia we have: a chimera has come to describe any mythical or fictional creature with parts taken from various animals, to describe anything composed of disparate parts or perceived as wildly imaginative, implausible, or dazzling.
That’s the most positive spin on chimerism I’ve come across. Most have to do with rather nasty and monterous beings, but the point is that a chimera is made up of different genetic parts. For the vast majority of us living beings, we have our own DNA imprinted onto every one of our cells. While I have my own DNA, I also now carry the DNA in my stem cells and blood of my cherished donor. Last week I had the first chimera testing done on my blood and it revealed that, in all the ways they can currently test, 100% of my blood now carries only the genetic fingerprint of my donor. This may shift in the future, but for now, this is the best possible news!
Chimeric testing is carried out to assess the degree of engraftment. If my bone marrow and blood forming capacity was not completely decimated prior to transplant, or if the engraftment was not effective, I could have retained some of my old blood DNA, which by the way, I don’t want! While my own blood served me well in a myriad of ways over all my pristine and healthy decades of life, it’s also the blood that contained leukemia. So…
