Patient Experience
As a 72-year-old with refractory AML, I had exhausted hope after two failed chemotherapies. Dr. Kartı didn't see an elderly patient; he saw a candidate for a reduced-intensity allogeneic transplant. His team at Acibadem Atakent crafted a protocol considering my mild renal impairment. The most remarkable part was his Saturday evening ritual—he'd personally review my graft-versus-host prophylaxis levels, calling the lab himself. Today, 18 months post-transplant, I'm tending my olive groves. He gave me not just years, but quality years.
Our 8-year-old daughter, Elif, was diagnosed with severe aplastic anemia. The world shattered. Dr. Kartı approached her not as a case, but as a little girl terrified of hospitals. He transformed her room into a 'princess recovery castle' with her drawings on the windows. For her haploidentical transplant from me (her father), he developed a novel TCRαβ/CD19 depletion protocol to minimize GVHD. He'd conduct rounds with a stuffed turtle puppet to explain procedures. Her engraftment day, he brought her a specific pistachio baklava she'd craved. We call it her 'rebirth cake.'
I presented as an emergency transfer from Cyprus with fulminant hepatic veno-occlusive disease post-transplant elsewhere. My family was told to prepare for the worst. Dr. Kartı's team performed what he called 'rescue defibrotide therapy' alongside a customized anticoagulation regimen he monitored hourly. He slept in the hospital for four nights, adjusting fluids based on my hourly urine output. His innovation? Using near-infrared spectroscopy to monitor liver oxygenation non-invasively. He pulled me from multisystem failure. This wasn't follow-up; it was resurrection.
As a 35-year-old with myelofibrosis, my routine pre-transplant workup revealed an unexpected clonal hematopoiesis of indeterminate potential (CHIP). Where others might have proceeded, Dr. Kartı paused everything. He initiated a deep sequencing protocol to characterize the clone, discovering a TET2 mutation. He redesigned my entire conditioning regimen and donor selection criteria around this finding, delaying by six weeks to find a perfectly matched unrelated donor with a lower CHIP risk. The attention to microscopic detail was staggering. My post-transplant course has been remarkably smooth—a testament to his philosophy that preparation is 90% of the cure.