Inspirational Stories

It started with a stiff neck. Then came fatigue and a sore throat. I started feeling full after only a few bites of food. Workouts were getting more difficult to complete. My heart rate was consistently north of 100 just lying in bed. Rationalized. It's maybe strep. Could be mono. I prescribed myself antibiotics and popped ibuprofen. Nothing was working. Reluctantly went to an urgent care after weeks of feeling like this. Bloodwork was done. The doctor came in, and I could immediately tell the results were not something he was used to seeing in his everyday battle against colds and sprained ankles. I was profoundly anemic, my platelets were dangerously low, and I had an absurdly high white count. We both looked at each other. I could sense his awkwardness, knowing that I knew what he knew. He wanted to send out the tests to an outside lab to confirm. I told him I'll take it from here and go see my family doctor first thing tomorrow morning.

The night was unsettling. I texted work and told them I was sick and could not make my OR cases the next day. It was the first sick call in my career. I asked my neighbor if I could swing by her clinic first thing in the morning and get a repeat blood draw. I slept unsoundly. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't know how bad it truly was. Tomorrow, life as I knew it was never going to be the same.

I paced around the house all day after my return from the morning blood draw. No one was home. The house was quiet. I was too weak to workout in the garage like I normally would and too restless to sleep. I remember it was a beautiful, gorgeous sunny day with a few clouds peppering the sky, and I uncharacteristically took a solo walk around the block to silence my mind. As I returned, I laid down in the front grass and just looked up at the clouds as they twisted into various shapes, just like I used to do when I was five years old in our front yard back on Reidy Road. I always found it calming.

My doctor came walking over to the house around 4:30 p.m. that afternoon. A real doctor's house call. I noticed as she got closer, she was holding a folded paper in her left hand. She hands it off. It's her handwriting with the various medical jargon ― WBC, Hgb, PLT, Flow Cytometry. That one piece of paper not only explained all my symptoms, it became an invitation to a life-altering path. I quickly deciphered the numbers. I was fatigued because my hemoglobin was only eight when it should be double that number. I could not eat much food because my spleen and liver were engorged from white blood cells crowding out any space for my stomach. My neck was sore because my cervical lymph nodes were swollen from my body responding to an invasion. My heart rate was over 100 because my body kept demanding oxygen that was not there. It all added up, and I never even saw it coming. My boxing coach always said It's that big left hook to the chin that you never see coming that puts you on the canvas. I had leukemia.

I needed urgent hospitalization. Those first hours became a very surreal out-of-body sensation as if I was witnessing it unfold on a TV show, too numb to fully understand what was happening and switching into fight mode. There was packing, hugs, and a drive to the ER. Into a hospital gurney, the tired and burned-out ER doc coming in from behind the curtain shaking his head at my blood results and offering his sympathies. I went from ER Bay 16 to the 7th-floor oncology room by nightfall. Within 24 hours, I would have a bone marrow biopsy, PICC line placement, and started on a continuous 24-hour/7-day infusion of the most intensive chemotherapy they can administer to a person to napalm my bone marrow into a vast wasteland void of any living cells, be it cancerous or non-cancerous. It would take me five weeks in the hospital just to recover. I was in a leukemic blast crisis as a result of being the proud new owner of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a relentless cancer that is hard to treat, prone to relapse, and considered a poor prognosis. Without swift treatment, I would be dead in just a couple of months. My only option was to hopefully achieve a window of remission from all the chemo and undergo a life-prolonging stem cell transplant. There was just one small caveat ― God willing, there was someone on this planet who could donate genetically matching stem cells to save my life. If there was no match, it was game over.

Two years have now passed since my transplant, and I'm still here. I underwent a month-long stay for a stem cell transplant in August 2022, emerging relatively unscathed considering the process itself could severely cripple or even potentially kill me (it's in the consent, sign here please). Things were going well. Then they weren’t. Day 78 post-transplant, and "it" had already returned. I had relapsed with cancer cells beginning to regrow in my bone marrow but caught it early and have been back in remission for over 18 months now and counting. I’ve been damn lucky to be where I am and at my current level of health given the treatment and an early relapse. I'm alive, I'm healthy, yet I remain uneasy.

When I was going through chemo, radiation, transplant, and all the sequela that comes from it, it was go, go, go, fight, get this thing out of my body, #fcancer, and so on. Adrenaline surges and positivity flows. Then it's gone, and everything gets quiet. The fight is supposedly over, and you try to resume your previous way of life. But you can’t. You don't realize that life after cancer can be just as difficult as life with cancer. No one tells you that. I now live life one monthly blood test at a time. Not a single day goes by when I don't think about this dreaded disease, not one single day. I think about what it has done to me and what it may do to me when it returns. It becomes a question of not if this disease will relapse but when. You become hyper-vigilant. Every cold now comes with trepidation. Is this a sore throat, or is this the return of "it?" Cancer strips you down to the core, and you are faced with the realization that inside your body is something that has tried to end your life and will try again. You can't plan for the future like you thought you could. This disease terrorizes your body when it's there, but then haunts your mind when it's not.

Cancer, like many events in life, reminds you that life is hard, and sometimes very unfair. Life, and events like this are going to happen; you will have a plan and have a vision and it will not play out the way you imagined it would. When you hear you have cancer, you will get mad. You become upset, nervous, tense, weak, and afraid. You put on a brave face, but when no one is around and you don't have to impress anyone, you go be with your thoughts, and that's when the fear comes in. You have no idea what the future holds for you, and that fear can paralyze you. You may cry and ask why, why me, what did I do to deserve this disease? Then there comes realization and ultimately a choice. The realization is that things will not always be in your favor. You don't always get to choose the skies you face. There are things in life that will be out of your control, yet the very worst thing you can do in life is let something that is out of your control to control you. You can control how you respond. You can control how you act, you can control your emotions, and how you move forward. A choice has to be made. A choice that will determine the rest of your life. And that's it, that's the turning point. There lies an opportunity. That's when cancer can actually begin to make you stronger. So, you ask yourself, “How are you going to move forward?” Are you going to be sad, afraid, depressed, weak, and bitter? No, that's too easy. Anyone can do that. That's the easy way, and it only ends up making your life harder. You do easy things, and your life will only be harder. But you can choose the hard way. You can choose to face this with courage and resolve. By being strong and unrelenting in whatever it throws at you, that is the path I have chosen. I absolutely refuse to be a victim. I can say no matter how mean, callous, unfair, and difficult life may be to me, this will never break me. Your courage is in your control. It won't always be easy. Life may continue to get harder and tougher, but you aren't going to just roll over. You make a choice. You owe it to yourself. You cannot stop. You cannot quit. You keep fighting; fight when it's there, fight when it's not there, fight with every breath. Fight as if your life depends on it because it does.