May Update

Wow, I can't believe its May 5th. Five months since my last update, and I'm sure by now almost no one's checking this anymore, but its time for me to post an update. Life's been extremely busy. Hope's walking, running, beginning to talk, and basically being an all around toddler. We have our hands full with her, she's full speed ahead from when she wakes up until she crashes, once for nap, once for night night. It's a blast, and I wouldn't trade a minute of it.

I am still doing very well. My last test results came back negative for cancer and according to my doctor, I'm doing extremely well. Basically, that means back to as normal as normal is going to be. I do still have some short term memory issues that are a problem, but there's nothing we can do about it. Large parts of my life, memories of places and people, are missing, which is sometimes upsetting, but not all that terrible. I also still have alot of recall issues, like if you tell me something in the morning, its probably 50-50 if I can recall it at dinner time. It depends on how focused and clear my mind is when you tell me. So, I'm learning to carry around a little notebook, thank you Jeff Abbott for the suggestion, and make notes of important things in my daily life. It's a pain, but it's better than the alternative.

Honore is doing great. She's finally starting to recover from the emotional trauma of last summer and fall. I cannot imagine how hard this must have been on her, or any of my family. There are many times I think it must be harder to be the survivor's spouse and family than the survivor. Honore had to keep life going, keep going to work, raising Hope, paying bills, all while trying to keep me upbeat and positive in my recovery. And I know that once home, I was no walk in the park. The hospital was tough, but in many ways being home has been tougher.

And while I'm at it, those who supported me throughout this ordeal share in the credit for my survival. From posting notes, sending cards and emails, to bringing dinners by all fall and taking care of Hope on my bad days, I cannot begin to thank you all enough.

Honore has a patient who underwent a stem cell transplant a year ago next week. I saw him a couple of weeks ago, and consider myself lucky. He looks like one of the skeleton's from the original Pirates of the Caribbean. He's lost 35% of his body weight, still has no hair and according to his doctor's he's right on track with where he should be. I look at him and think, "Man, I really am blessed to have recovered so well."

I never lost much weight, in fact I went into the hospital at 215 and came out at 207. Thanks to diet and exercise, I'm down to 190, which is where I would prefer to be anyway. My hair returned shortly after the first of the year, although its very curly, soft as a baby and has much less grey. In chemotherapy, hair loss is common. However, what you get when it returns is anyone's guess. In my case, its thick and soft, which it didn't used to be, and has much more black and less grey(yay!). And as my dear friend Clay says, "Buddy, at least you've got some." He's been bald since I met him seven years ago.

I did have some very tough news from Dr. Grinblatt, my main oncologist, in February. He told me my odds of relapse in the first five years after the transplant are 50-50, and that they "go down from there." All during my transplant, I kept thinking this would buy me 15-20 years. It really kept me going, thinking the transplant was a silver bullet of sorts. So, it was a bittersweet pill to swallow to learn that no, relapse is a question of when not if, and when may be much sooner than any of us were expecting.

I guess this was a big reason I didn't post the last couple of months. Many people's reaction to something like this is rather instinctively to go to the positive, "It's gone, those are just statistics. Don't think about them." I heard it alot when I talked to people about the news. Only, its not that simple from my perspective. See, the only treatment left for my disease is a donor transplant. Now, I'm lucky because my brother is a perfect match, and should I relapse, he would be my donor. However, donor transplants are far more dangerous than what I went through. The procedure has a 25% mortality rate, and the patients are far sicker for a far longer period of time. And, they run the risk of developing graft-vs-host disease, which is extremely dangerous because the grafted cells are the invincible white blood cells. The patient has no defense other than doing another autologus transplant to return to their original immune system, if they saved enough cells to do so.

Further, making it tough for me to talk about, I know what a transplant is like, and I don't want to do another one. Period. I really don't want to go through that again. It's hell. So, I crawl into my day-to-day life and don't post because it allows me to just live today and not think about the larger implications of what's going on in my body. But I need to write more, because mentally and emotionally, the battle is still not over.

I hope this post finds whomever reads it well. Thank you for your love and support.

Travis