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Michele,
If they find a matched donor for your husband, you don't have to agree to a proposed transplant schedule if you think you're being rushed. But when a transplant is needed and a donor is available, I think it makes sense to move quickly.
Once a possible donor is identified from the bone marrow registry, they have to be confirmed as a match, tested for medically eligibility, and interviewed to see if they are willing to donate. All this can take many weeks and often longer. If you're told about this while it's in progress then you'll have some advance notice. If they tell you about a donor only after he or she has been confirmed, then your transplant could be scheduled almost immediately. To be prepared, I suggest that you assume that a transplant could be arranged within weeks, if all goes well, even though you'll have to first wait for the highly variable donor-identification process.
The best time for a transplant is when the patient is as well-off as possible, which often means "before things get worse". The flipside is that if your husband's Dacogen treatment is improving his counts and increasing his strength and resistance to infection, there might be a case for waiting for further improvements. The bottom line is that your best chances are when you make the timing a medical decision.
When my wife and I decided to proceed to her transplant, our first impulse was to take time to plan our schedule a few months in advance. But once her hematologist explained the facts to us we realized that the rest of our lives had to go promptly on hold. We took the first available transplant date. My wife had MDS, was about the same age as your husband, and is now doing fine. I hope they find your husband a match and that it goes as well for him.
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