Inspirational Stories

I am very blessed to be surrounded by supportive family and friends and of having persistent pressure to not ignore my health. Thank you!

Soon after I moved to Alabama in the summer of 2013, I noticed that I was tired all the time. However, being stubborn, I just wrote it off as my new work/life balance. At that point, I had moved my family of four halfway across the country from Utah to Alabama, a state where we had no family or close friends. I was starting in a new position at the university, had a commute to work, and, in general, was cutting back on running. So, it was easy to make excuses for why I might have felt off or fatigued.

The first bit of good news, though, is that Alabama turns out to be a good place to live, and I quickly made a great group of friends. But as a scientist, my group of friends can be very interesting and have interests/requests that are out of the ordinary. One of those requests was if I would be a blood donor for a study. The friend was interested in measuring metabolic signatures of blood for defining disease status. They needed a healthy control, and as someone who had just run a marathon, and who most people, including myself, thought was healthy, I was a good candidate. So, I gladly agreed and gave my blood.

The first problem, my blood looked like anything but control. However, I said it must be a mistake. I just ran a marathon, and maybe the blood looks funny because I just got over a cold. More excuses. The fact that the marathon I had just run was almost a minute per mile slower than the one I had run nine months earlier, and a far cry from my best time of 2 hours and 39 minutes, just didn’t really sink in. I made more excuses.

Luckily for me, someone greater than me was looking out for my best interests, was not taking my excuses, and kept giving me subtle and a few not-so-subtle pushes to not continue to ignore this.

Now already February of 2014, the final kick in the butt was that the same friend came back for another control. He asked if I had fully recovered from my last marathon and my cold and if I would be a good volunteer. So, no excuses this time, I agreed, and it was still clear that my blood was anything but control.

I was called and told to head to my personal physician for a third blood draw. Before I was even home, the doctor, who was also a friend from church, called me and said, “You need to come in for a bone marrow biopsy, I think you have leukemia.” Well, shock and surprise are too subtle of words to describe how I felt. However, at that point, the only thought in my mind was how my family would be supported when I was dead.

I went in for the biopsy, and they found that two of my chromosomes, the way your cell stores its DNA, had broken, and when my cell repaired it, the pieces were put back together in the wrong way. In medical lingo, it meant I had chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML) which causes an increase in your white blood cells, the cells that are meant to fight off infection. Normal counts should be around 5,000. When you are sick, they might go up to 10,000. My counts were close to 100,000! This is called leukocytosis and can lead to organ failure.

Luckily for me, I was not aware of the amazing advances that have occurred in cancer biology in the last decade or so, and it turns out that some leukemias are curable. Because CML is caused by two pieces of DNA joining together that normally do not exist, they make a protein that normally doesn’t exist, and that can be targeted with medicine. The even luckier thing is that because of this, CML is one of those potentially curable leukemias.

I wasn’t out of the woods yet, but there was hope! I started treatment, and amazingly my white blood cell count quickly fell below 10,000. Then even more amazingly, within a year, I was completely cleared of any detectable cancer in my body. Now, this was nearly five years ago. I had beat the odds and was given another chance. I will say the experience has taught me so much about what is important and to never take something for granted.

Where the story continues . . .

Now cured and feeling pretty good about life, other stories started coming into my field of vision, and the one that hit me the hardest had to do with friends who had been outside of our mainstream lives for more than a decade. I was shocked, as the McCays had been some of our closest friends during our time in St. Louis. To find out that one of them had also been diagnosed with leukemia, but that hers was not the curable one, was devastating. However, I watched a video and many others that Emily so bravely shared and found them so moving. I still find them moving and inspirational. One, they highlighted how lucky I have been with CML and to not take that for granted. Two, they highlighted that although science had made amazing steps, we still have more to accomplish!

Unfortunately, and despite my attempts to reach out through messaging, I was not able to talk with Emily before leukemia ultimately took her from this life on November 23rd, 2018, a realization that is still one of my top regrets in life. The experience further taught me to not take anything for granted, and if you are thinking something is important, do it today, and do not put it off until tomorrow.