Camp KickassIt’s amazing what we cling to or, paradoxically, how the shape of our lives find a way around or through obstacles like aquatic life forms claiming a submerged automobile. Julie’s mediport was sewn into her body two days after her diagnosis of acute myeloid leukemia. This port would allow chemotherapy to bypass her veins and […]
Long before we struggled to understand this blood cancer, we tried to understand life. Like you, we were drawn to outlaw poets, lunatics and cult leaders, people who appeared to have broken free of our common ideology. Existentialism may now seem like a philosophy of adolescence, of “but MOM you don’t get it! Life is […]
When Randy was young, he remembers his grandmother – a woman slightly taller than a kitchen broom – rearranging the stars and holding back the ocean. Some people bravely called her stubborn (she would have laughed this off and said, no, she was just always right), but she was the sort of person who created […]
#FightBloodCancer For those new to this story, it’s mid-October 2021 and I’m recently in remission from a blood cancer (AML leukemia) that was diagnosed in mid-January (woo-hoo!). Blood Cancer Awareness month was in September and I missed my own deadline to launch this series because I was in the hospital Labor Day week being treated […]
“Many dreams come true, and some have silver linings I live for my dream, and a pocket full of gold.” Led Zeppelin, Over the Hills and Far Away It’s still me, Julie. It’s true – as of today I have ZERO evidence of cancer! Trying to process my feelings today has been a nice assorted […]
You’re an old pro at this now, unfortunately,” the nurse said today as a team prepped for my eighth bone marrow biopsy, with a need to draw 6 tubes of marrow versus the typical three for this round. Although we won’t have results until Friday or Monday, this is one of two big milestones: 1. […]
The German definitely made herself known this week, first spreading as a lovely red tattoo across Julie’s body and then settling into her gut, where she poked around, literally pushing the poo out of the Badass Panda Queen. This is all typical Graft vs. Host Disease (something we’ve been expecting), and we’ve been told that […]
We don’t always recognize the people who’ve put us on another path until we have the chance to reflect on the small changes that have changed everything. Tumbling along a road, picking up infinitely infinitesimal debris, it’s sometimes shocking to see how much the journey itself has transformed us; how much we have become the […]
Change happens quickly, like a sudden and unexpected storm, or with glacial slowness. Our turtle marathon has included both varieties, ranging from the urgent induction chemotherapy, that occurred within days of Julie’s leukemia diagnosis, to the infinitesimally incremental (watching blood count numbers climb by decibel points on her electronic patient portal). Throughout most of July, […]
At night, sometimes the man would whisper into her hip, “be something.” They’d only recently learned that the hip bone was a secret garden where blood was manufactured. It had never mattered before. But now that she had leukemia and needed an immediate bone-marrow transplant, every other occult wisdom or knowledge seemed frivolous, which may […]