Getting Started Again

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the last posting I made to this blog, it in 2021. Is my intention, starting tomorrow, to reinvigorate this effort.

Repeating what many of you already know, in early 2021 I was progressively feeling worse and worse, often find myself exhausted and short of breath. Finally, and at the insistence of Laura D’Angelo, I visited my physician. He ran a few test and told me I needed to go to the emergency room. I asked if I could go the next day, and he responded “If I had your numbers I would not be able to stand up.” So I did what you would expect me to do, namely go home to make sure my huskies were taken care of, and then I went to the emergency room. Then, for the first time since I was in eighth grade, I was admitted to a hospital. My initial diagnosis was severe anemia.

I was released the next day after significant blood and saline transfusions. There then started a week of tests, culminating on a Thursday afternoon bone marrow biopsy.  Friday morning my phone began blowing up with calls from the hospital telling me to get over there immediately to visit with the oncology team; it turns out I had fairly advanced AML (leukemia).

I was that afternoon admitted to the oncology unit of Norton Women’s and Children’s Hospital and began chemotherapy. I would be remiss to not report that the in-patient and out-patient care I received from the doctors and nurses was excellent. Then, around Thanksgiving of 2021, at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, after a week of really intensive chemotherapy intended to create a clean slate, I received a bone marrow stem cell transplant to “cure“ the leukemia. That worked, but unfortunately I came down with debilitating side effects to the transplant referred to as “graft/host disease“; essentially, I developed an allergy to the transplant. Since then I have been in treatment for the graft/host disease.

Most importantly to my already questionable mental stability, my Siberian Huskies Achilles and Hector are back with me, and although I am still not back to where I was, it seemed that this anniversary was the proper time to restart my blog. I hope you from time to time find it helpful or at least entertaining.

P.S. - Achilles and Hector are not allowed to read the Iliad, but then they can’t read Greek anyway.