With A Friend Like This...

My body and I have never really been on friendly terms.  One of my earliest memories is of having Dr. Yost stitch together a slice in my elbow.  Only a couple of years passed before I spent several weeks in bed recovering from nephritis.  That was followed not too long after with stitches in my tongue after I nearly bit it off jumping out of an apple tree in the back yard.  I missed a couple of weeks of third grade to heal from an appendectomy, and a couple of more in junior high for a failed attempt to reattach a tendon in my right pinkie.  I spent the summer between my junior and senior years of high school with what was finally diagnosed as Gilbert's syndrome.  The weekend before I was supposed to start with the Edgewater Police Department I broke two bones in my left foot while playing Frisbee in Boulder.

There was a moratorium for several years until I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis in 1994.  This was my introduction to a chronic disease which required ongoing treatment.  I am happy to report that my RA went into remission at the turn of the millennium and hasn't returned, although I sometimes wonder if the pharmacological cocktail I was treated with during those years had anything to do with the later onset of CML.  I had my right foot surgically reconstructed in 2001 to correct the effects of Charcot-Marie-Tooth disease.  My left knee was replaced in 2002.  Throw in a little gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) with clinical depression and you may begin to understand why I have come to regard myself as a runt.

With this medical background, the early indication of CML seemed innocent enough.  A routine blood draw revealed a white cell count that was off the chart.  I was referred to a specialist, and, voila! I was now able to add chronic myelogenous leukemia to my repertoire of medical conditions.  While none of my other conditions were immediately life-threatening, CML was accompanied by the specter of death in the not-too-distant future.  All of my mental gymnastics with regard to the meaning of life were about to be put to the test.