On February 24, a week and a few days after a bone marrow biopsy, I learned that I have a new, and more serious health condition than the one I have been battling over the past four years. In fact, it was the chemotherapy I received this past summer for that disease, called Langerhans Cell Histiocytosis (LCH), that is the cause of my new health challenge. Against 99 to 1 odds, the chemo seriously damaged my bone barrow to the point where I have a condition called myelodysplastic syndrome (MDS, formerly known as “preleukemia”).
What I’ve been focused on the past few weeks is once again preparing myself to enter unknown territory. My spiritual journey into more than three years of on-again and off-again chemotherapy I chronicled in my book, “Embraced by God: Facing Chemotherapy with Faith.” Now I am facing the very real possibility that this syndrome (which I and most others have never heard of) will transform itself into leukemia, which everyone has heard of and is just about as scary a word as cancer. In any case, I am facing what I was told was the only possible long-term cure for the syndrome/leukemia — a stem cell transplant.
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