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 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, and would need to sit and catch my breath even then.  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 be to go to the hospital, because 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.  They ran an EKG, which was fine, and 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 probably 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 in me, but about 20% of it was junk - leukemia cells that were not transporting oxygen.  They were just circulating and doing nothing but multiplying.  They were surprised that I'd walked into the hospital under my own power.  My hemoglobin count was 4, and the bare minimum level that hospital protocol requires a blood transfusion is 8, twice that.  The normal level for hemoglobin is 13-18.  

The following day, the doctor informed me that I 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!