Intro To My Story

This is the story of my finding out I had an incurable and lethal form of leukemia. It starts in early 2002. I've been lucky, as I've lived more than twelve years with the disease, which is longer than the average longevity for a lot of folks. I never thought I'd live this long! This story starts out with a series of messages I sent to my family regarding my illness, before I even knew what I had. Then it goes through a lot of anguished and fearful messages as I realize what I'm dealing with. You see, my dad died of the same disease after having it for five years. These short messages start in February and go up to about July 2002, when I started my first round of chemotherapy.

When I finally started my first round of chemotherapy in July 2002, I began a journal, at the suggestion of a colleague, which I sent out to concerned friends and family. I included a lot of medical information about the disease and its treatments, my fears about my future and what was going to happen to my wife when I died, plus a lot of personal information that concerns things not generally discussed in public; my depression, references to sexual dysfunctions, side effects, diet and weight problems and, uh, excretory problems (all in good humor of course, without many clinical details). I'm a physician so I'm pretty open with these things. They're what I dealt with in caring for patients for decades, after all. There are many deep, thoughtful passages about death and dying, but there are also a lot of very humorous references about my treatments and my many misadventures (such as the time I accidentally pulled a central line out of my chest while in the shower--"Dumb ass!" I called myself) that I experienced during my therapy. There's rare bawdy humor, too, but I tried to restrain myself, not being sure exactly who was reading my stuff. You may find some of these things interesting, funny, sad, boring, too clinical, or whatever. It kinda reads like a book, and each "verse" (as I for some reason listed each passage) tends to build on the previous ones. Our daughter convinced me that e-mails were "so last-century" and she encouraged me to start this blog. So here ya go!

It presently consists roughly of seven sections starting with the compiled messages to my family from early 2002. The divisions between are roughly as follows:
Prologue-- early 2002 up to about July 2002.
Book One-- The First Chemotherapy Experience, July 22, 2002 until October 2003
Book Two-- Relapse, and The Second Chemotherapy Experience, With Stem Cell Collection, October 2003 to about October 2004 with a few updates thereafter
Book Three-- Starting in February 2008, More Chemotherapy and Some Experimental Stuff, with introductory information in the letters leading up "Book Three."
Book Four--It's Baaack! Starting March 2010.
Book Five--PCI 32765; the Bruton's tyrosine kinase inhibitor. Starting March 2012
Book Six--Venetoclax. Starting about August 2016
Book Seven--The Transplant, starting in January 2017

I welcome e-mail questions about my journey and frequently have addressed them openly in my letters which have been sent out across the US, Germany and Scotland to many concerned friends and family. I can be reached at dreck@prodigy.net

I hope to use this blog to keep all you folks who are reading this updated from time to time as I progress into my adventure and experience more and different treatments.

A DISCLAIMER: This is rather like the old TV ad that went, "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV." When this series of stories started many years ago, it was sent exclusively to close friends and family. Gradually it was resent to more and more folks who had an interest in how I was doing, until I had a couple hundred folks or so on my mailing list. But, then my kids convinced me that it would be easier to put it all on-line so that all my correspondents could access it more easily. And, in fact that has happened. But what has also happened that, through the miracle of Google searches, many, many people around the world, who have an interest in CLL, have found my stories and have inquired about how I'm doing and asking questions or for advice on what they should do, as many of them also have CLL. I welcome these questions and inquiries but I must state that, though I have been dealing with CLL for almost 15 years now, and am a veteran of multiple kinds of treatments, and read a lot about CLL, and am a physician as well, I can't really be considered an "expert" on CLL. I am very happy to help folks go through their options and offer what I think is accurate advice and information about current treatments, but there are so many variations in this disease, and so many factors to consider, that I must make clear to anyone reading my stories that my advice is just that, and cannot be considered a clinical recommendation. Any options for treatment must be discussed with your doctor, and hopefully, with a leukemia expert. When I read through the papers presented at the clinical oncologist meetings, I am overwhelmed with the amount of information about my disease that I don't understand. There is so much information out there that no one person can know it all, especially a retired OB-GYN doc like me. But, I sincerely will try to help anyone who asks to understand what their options are and help them to know what questions they ought to ask before beginning treatments. Thanks for taking the time to read through all this!