Very Good Bad News: Cancer Sucks [Me]

That little guy up above in the crib is me with really cool glasses eating a pack of M&Ms, but–newsflash–it’s not a recent photo. It’s from around Easter 1975 when I was in the hospital with Guillian-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune disorder. Not really sure how I contracted it, but I made a full recovery.

That was the last time I spent any meaningful time in the hospital–until recently. I’ve mentioned in some recent posts that I’ve been sick over the last couple of weeks and missed quite a bit of the kids’ activities. Turns out, I was diagnosed with leukemia on October 6 and admitted to the hospital for several days to try to reduce my white blood cell count down quickly. It was a pretty scary couple of days as the doctors attempted to get my numbers down and nail down the diagnosis so that we could move on to a long-term treatment plan.

Good news is that Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and I have chronic myelogenous leukemia or CML (he’s just like me!) and the prognosis is very good. No chemo, no radiation, no stem cell transplant. Take pills everyday for the rest of my life and I’ve got an 85+% chance of going into remission.

I’m under the care of a very impressive team at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, but I don’t have to go but once a quarter. I’ve been on medication for over two weeks now and things seem to be normalizing. Looking forward to getting back to a normal schedule.