Leukemia :(

 "If you're lonely when you are alone - you are in bad company" - Jean-Paul Sartre

I had mentioned feeling poorly in a couple of the last few posts.  I was going to say "more recent", but none of those posts very are recent :)  For several months, I slowly became more and more easily winded - as in needing to stop and catch my breath after a flight of stairs.  Toward the end, I was winded after toweling off after a shower or getting dressed for work, and would need to sit and catch my breath.  I also had a persistent cough that would not clear.

 In early December of 2025, I took a week of vacation, and toward the end of that week my wife finally convinced me to go to the hospital.  A couple of earlier visits to the walk-in clinic had not resulted in returning me to good health.  Unbeknownst to me at the time, this was a major turning point in my life.  I never did return to work.

Once I checked into the ER at Kootenai Health Hospital in Coeur d'Alene, life changed permanently.  The very first test was an EKG (electrocardiogram), which turned out perfectly fine.  They also took a lot of blood samples.  Eventually the doctor that I would come to know quite well came for a visit and said that it looked like I have leukemia, and that they needed to perform further testing to determine what type of leukemia we were dealing with.  Stoic or not, I have to admit that there were a few moments of shock after hearing that diagnosis.

But because I'm pretty stoic, that adrenaline and fear moment passed quickly, and I asked the doctor 'where do things go from here?'  I was admitted to the hospital and given 8 units of blood over the next several days.  I had plenty of blood, but over 20% of it was junk - leukemia cells that were not transporting oxygen.  The leukemia cells were just circulating and doing nothing but multiplying - cloning themselves.  

The hospital staff was surprised that I'd walked in under my own power without need for a wheelchair.  My hemoglobin count was 4, meanwhile hospital protocol requires a blood transfusion once hemoglobin falls below 8.  The normal level for hemoglobin is 13-18, so the oxygen-carrying capability of my blood was very diminished indeed.  

The following day, the doctor informed me that I most likely had AML - Acute Myeloid Leukemia, which is the same disease that took the life of Tatiana Schlossberg, the granddaughter of president John F. Kennedy.  This was not very comforting, because one would assume she had the best medical care that money could buy.  The hospital stay would turn into quite a long one.  More on that in the next post...  

Spoiler alert:  Everything worked out fine in the end!