![]() This is what I write 30 times while in hospital and continue to write for days after. every morning, after I’m measured, my nurse asks me to hand write a sentence: “I want to live in a better world.” This is the sentence I pull out of my head a few days before going into the hospital. Through my veins travels the donor t-cells that have been genetically engineered to track down my wild and cancerous t-cells and act as bouncer t-cells, escorting them to the exit door.Īt 6 a.m. On the first day, I am surrounded by a team of nurses, one of whom administers my t-cell infusion. My recent 10 days in hospital under the watchful eye of nurses are punctuated by measurements of my vital signs and my neurological function. And yet I am facing an illness and treatments that disrupt my body and will surely shorten my life. A level of uncertainty that I know much of the world deals with daily: “Will I have enough to feed my family?” “Will my children survive and grow?” “Will I escape violence or survive it?” I have the privilege not to deal with those struggles. And yet I do not know if my recent infusion of genetically engineered t-cells will bounce those misbehaving cells out of my body. I have made a lie of my earlier best-before-date. Lymphoma is almost always treated with chemotherapy, stem cell transplant and newer treatments using genetically engineered t-cells to stimulate the immune system.Īlmost four years and three treatments later, I shout hooray for the medical care I have received along with the tremendous and sustaining support of family and community. Conventional medicine has little understanding of why my t-cells rebel, mutate and grow uncontrollably. It is systemic like all of the terrors and suffering of our society wealth inequalities, white supremacy, misogyny and the climate crisis. Lymphoma is a systemic illness, meaning it has the capacity to travel through the body, through the blood. The blood clot in my right leg was the telltale sign in addition to my exhaustion, night sweats and fevers. These are the things I do know: My rare t-cell lymphoma, ( is it really mine?) was diagnosed in 2018 at stage 3. How can I even write about cancer and me in the same sentence? All I can write is fragments, because the whole is not in focus yet and maybe never will be. And I ask myself, does the world really need another cancer story? Why do I feel drawn to put words on a page to make sense of something that is difficult to comprehend.
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