Well, it has been longer than three years.

About 12 years ago, a 15 years year-old girl came to me with a cough. Her chest x-ray showed a huge mediastinal mass. She turned out to have T-cell leukemia.

She was treated in Albany, NY. Although induction was a little rough (platelets hovered around 10,000, nosebleeds, etc), she muddled through and is alive and well today.

Interestingly, a couple years later the oncologist told her mother that at around the same time, two other children presented with T-cell leukemia. They were treated conventionally & transfused. Neither one survived.

Thank you for your reply.
Our 17 year old son has been idagnosed with pre-B-ALL.
He is undergoing chemotherapy since April 2008. The study protocoll that is used is the ALL-BFM-2000. The chemotherapy used based on this protocol is a very strict and aggressive one.
In the estimation of my wife and me we feel that using this protocol made it impossible for our son to go through the therapy without transfusions. Even though the clinic is extremely cooperative by tolerating very low blood counts (platelets < 10000, HB < 4.0). We changed to this clinic after having experienced that the first clinic didn't tolerate such low levels. The clinic we are in now is usually using the COALL protocol, but had to continue with our son on the BFM-2000. What we are observing is that those children who are treated with COALL have a lot less likelyhood of needing transfusions since it allows the body to recover and starting its own production of platelets, red blood cells, etc. The COALL protocol seems to be more friendly to those parents / children who desire to have no transfusions.
The usage of Interleukin 11 / Neumega is under a lot of discussion / debate here in Germany. Many doctors question the benefit since some researchers claim that it also stimulates the growth of tumorcells. It is not payed for by the health system and therefore needs to be paid privately. Even though the costs are very high (1 shot costs about 350€ and so far our son received 30+ shots) we feel that it plays a very high role in the therapy and that it reduced the transfusions a lot.

I sincerely hope that this information is helpful to anyone reading it. This reflects our personal experience and should be carefully and thourougly discussed with your doctor.

OP