Leukemia Survival Quotes

I want a dyke for president. I want a person with AIDS for president and I want a fag for vice president and I want someone with no health insurance and I want someone who grew up in a place where the earth is so saturated with toxic waste that they didn’t have a choice about getting leukemia. I want a president that had an abortion at sixteen and I want a candidate who isn’t the lesser of two evils and I want a president who lost their last lover to AIDS, who still sees that in their eyes every time they lay down to rest, who held their lover in their arms and knew they were dying. I want a president with no air-conditioning, a president who has stood in line at the clinic, at the DMV, at the welfare office, and has been unemployed and laid off and sexually harassed and gaybashed and deported. I want someone who has spent the night in the tombs and had a cross burned on their lawn and survived rape. I want someone who has been in love and been hurt, who respects sex, who has made mistakes and learned from them. I want a Black woman for president. I want someone with bad teeth and an attitude, someone who has eaten that nasty hospital food, someone who crossdresses and has done drugs and been in therapy. I want someone who has committed civil disobedience. And I want to know why this isn’t possible. I want to know why we started learning somewhere down the line that a president is always a clown. Always a john and never a hooker. Always a boss and never a worker. Always a liar, always a thief, and never caught.

But the story of leukemia--the story of cancer--isn't the story of doctors who struggle and survive, moving from institution to another. It is the story of patients who struggle and survive, moving from on embankment of illness to another. Resilience, inventiveness, and survivorship--qualities often ascribed to great physicians--are reflected qualities, emanating first from those who struggle with illness and only then mirrored by those who treat them. If the history of medicine is told through the stories of doctors, it is because their contributions stand in place of the more substantive heroism of their patients.

Your daughter has schizophrenia," I told the woman. "Oh, my God, anything but that," she replied. "Why couldn't she have leukemia or some other disease instead?" "But if she had leukemia she might die," I pointed out. "Schizophrenia is a much more treatable disease." The woman looked sadly at me, then down at the floor. She spoke softly. "I would still prefer that my daughter had leukemia.

He was the one, however, with whom no one wanted his or her picture taken, the one to whom no one wanted to introduce his son or daughter. Louis and Gage knew him; they had met him and faced him down in New England, some time ago. He was waiting to choke you on a marble, to smother you with a dry-cleaning bag, to sizzle you into eternity with a fast and lethal boggie of electricity—Available at Your Nearest Switchplate or Vacant Light Socket Right Now. There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want—hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha. And that thin voice is crying, “I love you, Tigger! I love you! I believe in you, Tigger! I will always love you and believe in you, and I will stay young, and the only Oz to ever live in my heart will be that gentle faker from Nebraska! I love you . . .” We cruise . . . my son and I . . . because the essence of it isn’t war or sex but only that sickening, noble, hopeless battle against Oz the Gweat and Tewwible. He and I, in our white van under this bright Florida sky, we cruise. And the red flasher is hooded, but it is there if we need it . . . and none need know but us because the soil of a man’s heart is stonier; a man grows what he can . . . and tends it.

There was death in a quarter bag of peanuts, an aspirated piece of steak, the next pack of cigarettes. He was around all the time, he monitored all the checkpoints between the mortal and the eternal. Dirty needles, poison beetles, downed live wires, forest fires. Whirling roller skates that shot nurdy little kids into busy intersections. When you got into the bathtub to take a shower, Oz got right in there too—Shower with a Friend. When you got on an airplane, Oz took your boarding pass. He was in the water you drank, the food you ate. Who’s out there? you howled into the dark when you were frightened and all alone, and it was his answer that came back: Don’t be afraid, it’s just me. Hi, howaya? You got cancer of the bowel, what a bummer, so solly, Cholly! Septicemia! Leukemia! Atherosclerosis! Coronary thrombosis! Encephalitis! Osteomyelitis! Hey-ho, let’ s go! Junkie in a doorway with a knife. Phone call in the middle of the night. Blood cooking in battery acid on some exit ramp in North Carolina. Big handfuls of pills, munch em up. That peculiar blue cast of the fingernails following asphyxiation—in its final grim struggle to survive the brain takes all the oxygen that is left, even that in those living cells under the nails. Hi, folks, my name’s Oz the Gweat and Tewwible, but you can call me Oz if you want— hell, we’re old friends by now. Just stopped by to whop you with a little congestive heart failure or a cranial blood clot or something; can’t stay, got to see a woman about a breach birth, then I’ve got a little smoke-inhalation job to do in Omaha.

I decided to call my cancer the little c rather than the Big C. I wasn't giving it that much power over my life!

I certainly don’t want to lose my hair. But, then again, I don’t want to have hairy cell leukemia. And I don’t want to lose my life to save my head of hair, which I know will grow back after the chemotherapy is done. That is, if I survive.

The personal case histories were the most encouraging. A prominent Los Angeles public relations executive has been living with MM for fourteen years, rides horses, and has an altogether active life on drug maintenance. An Arizona man survived MM and with his wife set up a foundation and website for other families bewildered by the diagnosis. I learned, for the first time, that Frank McGee, host of the Today show from 1971 to 1974, suffered from MM and kept it from everyone despite his ever more gaunt appearance. When he died after putting in another full week on the air his producers and friends were stunned. Sam Walton, founder of Walmart, was another MM casualty, which led many to believe that he had established the high-profile multiple myeloma treatment center in Little Rock, Arkansas. This is a full-immersion process in which MM is the singular target under the commanding title of Myeloma Institute for Research and Therapy. There is a Walton auditorium on the institute’s University of Arkansas medical school campus, but the institute itself was founded by Bart Barlogie, a renowned MM specialist from the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston. The institute has an impressive record, running well ahead of the national average for survival for those who are dealing with MM. One number is especially notable. The institute has followed 1,070 patients for more than ten years, and 783 have never had a relapse of the disease. Sam Walton was treated by Dr. Barlogie at MD Anderson before the Little Rock institute was founded, but the connection ended there. Walton, who’d had an earlier struggle with leukemia, didn’t survive his encounter with multiple myeloma, dying in April 1992, a time when life expectancy for a man his age with this cancer was short. I was unaware of all of this when I was diagnosed. I took comfort in the repeated reassurances of specialists that great progress in treating MM with a new class of drugs, your own body’s reengineered immunology system, was rapidly improving chances of a longer survival than the published five to ten years. As I began to respond to treatment the favored and welcome line was, “You’re gonna die but from something else.

One of my cats was coughing and sneezing. She looked as if she had trouble breathing and took to hiding under a desk. Would she survive the night? Is it just a cold or something much worse like cat leukemia? The vet announced it only a virus – an answer to prayer.   On a four-hour hike with my mother, two aunts and my brother’s mother-in-law, the average age was 65. The terrain was full of obstacles with fallen trees, raspberry bush thorns, and slippery logs. We made the entire trip without incidence – an answer to prayer.   My daughter had fallen from the monkey bars and landed with an audible crack from her left arm. She cried and complained that she could not move her elbow. Hours (and a full set of x-rays) later showed that it was only a minor fracture – an answer to prayer.   If I were to start a journal, it would fill up rather quickly. I find God’s faithfulness inexhaustible. He is a caring, compassionate and concerned Father. How great is His faithfulness.       Prayer is security, having a connection to God. ~ Andi Harris         * Did you enjoy these devotionals? Please take a moment to write a review on Amazon. Share the blessings.   *   Sign up for Kimberley’s free newsletter for regular updates and offers. I promise I won’t share your email address with anyone else. And just for signing up, I’ll send you the devotional, Where Family Meets Faith   *   Visit Kimberley Payne’s blog for weekly posts and other interesting stuff to encourage women.   *   Where else to find Kimberley online: Facebook Twitter *   If you like these devotionals, visit Under the Cover of Prayer blog for more of the same.

Great is His Faithfulness     “Because of the LORD’s great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness” (Lamentations 3:22-23).     At church on Sunday, they sang a song from the hymnbook called, “Great is Thy Faithfulness.” The lyrics were by Thomas Obediah Chisholm and music by William Marion Runyan. Although I had difficulty singing along, I paid close attention to the words. My favourite line was, “All I needed Thy hand hath provided.”   This verse resonated with my soul that day. It didn’t say, “All that I wanted” but rather, “All that I needed.” I took a moment to reflect on the last five years of my life and I was taken to my knees in awe and appreciation.   I wish that I had kept a journal of answered prayer. I think this is a brilliant idea. I have kept notes here and there and I have various journals that I write in every day, but I’ve never dedicated one book to just answered prayer.   There are so many little things that I pray for every day. My husband was working on my income tax on the computer when all of a sudden the program kicked him out. Two hours of work – lost. But it was restored within ten minutes without as much as one number out of place – an answer to prayer.   One of my cats was coughing and sneezing. She looked as if she had trouble breathing and took to hiding under a desk. Would she survive the night? Is it just a cold or something much worse like cat leukemia? The vet announced it only a virus – an answer to prayer.   On a four-hour hike with my mother, two aunts and my brother’s mother-in-law, the average age was 65. The terrain was full of obstacles with fallen trees, raspberry bush thorns, and slippery logs. We made the entire trip without incidence – an answer to prayer.  

When I really think about it, life is not so unlike the evening news. It’s nice to end the story with a happy kicker, a piece that makes us all feel good inside, like the boy who beat leukemia or the baby panda who survived. But the moments that define us, that strip us down to raw bone and cartilage and build us back up: they are the tough ones. They are the stories of grief or tragedy, stories tinged with sadness and sorrow. They are the leads on the nightly news, the ones that grab our attention and glue us to the screen. I believe how we attack those curve balls is the stuff of life; they count just as much as the good times. Perhaps there are lessons here, lessons for others who will inevitably hit the gritty pavement of life, often when they least expect it.

Those who survived mustard-gas attacks later developed severe anemia, requiring monthly blood transfusions. They were also prone to recurrent, lingering, and sometimes fatal infections. In 1919, one year after World War I ended, two American pathologists, Helen and Edward Krumbhaar, performed autopsies on seventy-five soldiers who had been killed by mustard gas. They found that the gas depleted the bone marrow, where red blood cells, white blood cells, and platelets are made. They also found that lymph nodes, another source of white blood cells, had shrunk. The Krumbhaars published their findings in 1919. No one noticed. Specifically, no one recognized that if mustard gas could eliminate white blood cells and shrink lymph nodes, maybe it could also eliminate cancers of the bone marrow (leukemias) and cancers of the lymph nodes (lymphomas).

The incidence of CML remains unchanged from the past: only a few thousand patients are diagnosed with this form of leukemia every year. "But the prevalence of CML---the number of patients presently alive with the disease---has dramatically changed with the introduction of Gleevec.  As of 2009, CML patients treated with Gleevec survive an average of thirty years after their initial diagnosis.  Based on that survival figure, Hagop Kantarjian estimates that within the next decade, 250,000 people will be living with CML in America, all of them on targeted therapy.  Druker's drug will alter the national physiognomy of cancer, converting a once-rare disease into a relatively common one.  (Druker jokes that he has achieved the perfect inverstion of the golas of cancer medicine: his drug has increased the prevalence of cancer in the world.)

Here are the odds of five-year survival for several common cancers: Cancer Type Odds If Localized If Spread to Lymph Nodes Odds If Metastatic Chance of Getting It Chance of Dying From It Malignant Melanoma 90% 10% 2.5% 0.5% Squamous Cell Skin Cancer ~100% 10% 7.5% 0.01% Bladder Cancer 88% 55% 15% 2.5% 0.6% Breast Cancer ~100% 72% 22% 12% 3% Prostate Cancer ~100% ~100% 28% 15% 2.6% Colorectal Cancer 92% 65% 11% 4.6% 1.9% Esophageal Cancer 40% 21% 4% 0.9% 0.7% Lung Cancer 31% 15% 2% 6.8% 5.8% Pancreatic Cancer 14% 7% 1% 1.5% 1.35% Liver Cancer 28% 7% 2% Leukemia Varies Varies Varies 1.4% 0.8%