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Absolute Comfort With One Option

Hey all, hope you are treating this day well. I would like to remind all of you living in or near St. John’s that in just 2 days we will attempt to “fill the Hill”. Registration is at 6:00 p.m. at the NewTel building, for a Climb that starts at 6:30, bring friends and family and I hope to see you there if at all possible. I feel that I should note, as I watch the Weather Network, that I’ll be climbing rain, shine, fog, and/or snow. There will be no stopping me from getting up that Hill on Thursday. I’ll look forward to seeing you at the bottom, along the way up and at the top.

For those of you in other regions of the country/world I have started to think through development and rapid expansion of the Climb to new regions as it would be great to have people climbing in every corner of the country. We’ll play with that over the year. Anyway on to my purpose for today’s message…

The real reason I’m writing is to give you another snapshot of my mind as I play with another major life decision. This is the second such decision, or at least I have put my present decision on the same level as my first Transplant decision. I have written to you all regarding Ottawa’s willingness to Transplant me, and shared the tentative schedule that I will follow should I continue down that path. As at present I’m not fully sure I will have a second Transplant right away. I do have an appointment next week, which I will attend, and at that time I hope to get another opinion regarding my next step.

Personally I feel that whenever we are faced with a decision – a fork in the road, so to speak – we look for complete comfort with one of the potentially many options in front of us. At least that is what I do, and that full and complete comfort comes from within me, it comes from my “gut”. For those who have read my Original Series messages you will know that I did not default to having my first Transplant just because I had identified a donour. It was a very tough decision for me, and I took about a month to think about it. That month was spent searching for complete comfort with one of the options I had in front of me.

On one side I had Transplant, which came with about a 70% chance of success, but also with this side-affect that I had trouble accepting – sterility. Having a Bone Marrow Transplant ensures that you will be sterile – 99.9%, and at the age of 23 and being a person who loves kids and wanted to have my own, that was tough to swallow. On the other side I had the option of no Transplant, and that came with only about a 20% chance of long-term cure (5 years). Ultimately I did decide to have a Transplant but the full and complete comfort was forced, it wasn’t natural.

I now find myself in a very similar situation. I have another life decision to make, and once again I don’t have full and complete comfort with either of my options. Presently I am balancing the option of a second Transplant in Ottawa, and that 40% chance of success, against an experimental treatment in Seattle that has not been proven to cure Leukemia but the early results of the stage 1/2 trial are encouraging. This procedure is also far less toxic and does not negate a second Transplant in the future. The medical advice I have received to this point ranges, as expected, but the consistent piece of info that I have received is there is no information available to say that DLI (which I mentioned a while ago and is the experimental treatment) or Transplant should come first, more to the point I could choose either option, and should I relapse again the other option would still be available to me.

Basically there is no evidence that is pulling me to one side of this decision. On one side we have a toxic invasive option, that has a mortality rate of 20-30% but has been proven to “cure” my condition in the past, and on the other side we have an option that has shown encouraging results, early, is far less toxic and thus less of a risk, and is being supported by one of the best Transplant Centers in the world (Seattle). I will be making time to sit with this decision, and she where my insides take me, but so far I haven’t been pulled in either direction, and unfortunately I don’t have a month to make this decision as I did the first time. Time is tight, but I will get comfort with one option, enough comfort to make a decision and commit to one path of treatment.

I wanted to let you know where my mind is, when I sit and relax that’s where it is. And I do recognize that I haven’t made near enough time to sit, relax and run things by my “gut” in the past many days. That will change promptly. As always, as I work through this decision you will hear from me.

Have a great day.

 

Always…
Live Life. Love Life.

Geoff

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