Life with Cancer: You're going to want to read this update from Lea

Happy Monday! Hope everyone enjoyed the weekend. Mine was lovely...and muy eventful. I plan to tell you all about it, but first I wanted to share this incredible post from Lea, our favorite guest blogger. As you know Lea had CML, just like me, but Gleevec didn't work for her. In December she had a bone marrow transplant from an anonymous donor and has been on the long, hard road to recovery ever since. Here's the latest:

Hey everyone, it's Lea, almost 150 days post transplant. I am still nowhere near "normal" as far as energy and strength--and I take about 30 pills a day just to maintain where I am now--but I am ALIVE! And I have some very cool news to share: As you know, my bone marrow donor was unrelated and I am not to know her identity until one year post transplant. I am allowed to write her letters (I send them to the hospital where I received my transplant, they send it to the National Bone Marrow Registry, the NBMR sends it to the hospital where my donor donated, and finally they send it to the donor with any trace of my identity pretty much stripped away) and I have written to her three times and I just received a letter from her last week!

I was SHAKING reading this letter. Just the fact that my donor already gave me a second shot at life and took the time to write me back made me feel connected to her. My blood type has changed to her blood type now, her cells are mine, and I am guessing she really likes Oreos and OJ because I have a newfound fetish with them both! Here's what I learned: She is 37 years old and had been on the registry for over 14 years when she got a call out of the blue to see if she would donate her bone marrow to save my life. What she told me is that she and her husband had just suffered a miscarriage 16 weeks into her pregnancy and were obviously depressed about the loss. She jumped at the chance to give life to something/someone else after her own tragedy. The sad reality is that had she not lost the baby, she would not have been able to donate to me. I start to feel guilty about that but my gratitude seems to overpower those twinges. Even though my life right now is full of restrictions, she has given me the chance to meet a new born niece I might not have ever met (see the photo, above), spend amazing time with family and friends, and continue the hope that I will be cured of this disease for the rest of my life. She has, in fact, given me "the rest of my life." That's pretty amazing, isn't it?

--Lea

P.S. If you're interested in becoming a donor or donating cord blood, PLEASE go to marrow.org.


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