In a small isolation chamber at the Royal Hallamshire Hospital in Sheffield, Adrian Sudbury is about to undergo an operation that he hopes will save his life. For every 100 patients who have a bone-marrow transplant up to 30 do not survive.

It is a momentous occasion and only fitting that he should film it. Mr Sudbury, who is 25, will also keep a video diary of his progress through the perilous month that will follow. The filming will provide a distraction during the long hours of confinement and will help to raise awareness of a little-understood but crucial cancer treatment.

He was told that he had acute myeloid leukaemia, a cancer of the blood cells, last December. For several weeks he had been suffering what his doctor diagnosed as a bout of flu. After being sent home a second time and told to drink lemon juice and honey, he drove to the Royal Hallamshire accident and emergency department. A consultant later told him that if he had not come in he might not have lasted a fortnight.

Mr Sudbury had been fit and healthy and was working as an journalist for the Huddersfield Daily Examiner. On Christmas Eve he found himself in hospital, watching midnight Mass from his bed after his first course of chemotherapy.

He went on to have more courses of treatment, followed by fevers, vomiting and a bout of pneumonia, but it appeared that he had developed two types of leukaemia: while one was going into remission, the other was flourishing wildly. He was told that without successful treatment he would die within a year.

The bone marrow transplant was, as Mr Sudbury puts it, “a case of the last chance saloon”.

The Anthony Nolan Trust, a charitable foundation that runs a Europe-wide bone marrow donor register, found a donor on the Continent. “I was under the impression that the process of donation involved some sort of medieval torture equipment, but in most cases it’s not that different to giving blood,” he said.

Last week he began a course of drugs to suppress his immune system, followed by two bouts of chemotherapy. This week he has undergone two days of “total body irradiation” in preparation for the transplant tomorrow, when the donor cells will be introduced via a blood transfusion. He will then remain in isolation for a month, hoping that the donor cells graft to his own bone marrow to fight the cancer.

“They are just not sure how I will react,” he said. “Even if the bone marrow cells are a 100 per cent match it doesn’t mean they will be adopted by your body.”

In some cases the new cells attack the host body and the cure may kill the patient. Equally, the rigorous suppression of Mr Sudbury’s immune system through drugs, chemotherapy and irradiation to stop his body rejecting the foreign cells will leave him greatly vulnerable to infection, which is why he will need to be in isolation.

In some patients the treatment destroys the mucus lining of their mouth and throat, making it painful to eat. “I have seen people require morphine injections directly into their throat,” he said. “It’s horrible.”

Throughout April he was instructed to put on weight by eating large amounts of steaks, cakes and fatty foods.

The week before he was readmitted to hospital, he went on a road trip of Britain with his girlfriend, Poppy. “It was like my last week of freedom. Then I remember opening the door of the room and thinking, this is it now,” he said.

There had been a real sense of camaraderie on the ward, he said, where patients would concoct plans for wild holidays after their successful treatment.

In isolation he has found himself becoming increasingly reliant on the nurses and doctors who will treat him. “They listen to my troubles,” he said.

As well as medical staff and a chaplain, he was able to designate three people who could come into the chamber: his mother, father and girlfriend. “This sort of thing devastates your family and causes huge worries for everyone around you,” he said. At times he has caught himself imagining them at his funeral.

If the transplant is successful, he will grow an entirely new immune system and require all his childhood vaccinations again. He may also suffer from childhood diseases such as chicken pox, and he will develop an entirely new blood type, switching from O-positive to the A-positive of the donor.

The side-effects to the treatment are infertility and an increased chance of developing other cancers in the future.

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