Please Send Good Vibes to Steve

Okay, once I got some news today about my friend Michelle’s dad, Steve, I decided to delay my blogger holiday by a day.

I met Michelle last year when she was doing Team in Training in honor of her dad. He had a serious pre-leukemia condition, the name of which I cannot pronounce. He went through a lot of chemo to, futilely, hold it in check. This spring, it progressed to full-blown leukemia, and he was give a couple weeks to live without intensive chemotherapy leading to a bone marrow transplant.

Since that time, Steve has suffered immensely trying to beat the leukemia. I can’t list all of the terrible things he went through during something like two months at Duke – where he reported great medical care but terrible waffles (how can a place cure cancer but ruin waffles – the world’s easiest thing to make?) But things did not go well there. Despite everything, 100% of the leukemia cells could not be killed off, and without this, a bone marrow transplant will fail. To make things worse, he had a terrible bout with fungal pneumonia and they had to remove a big piece of a lung. They finally sent him home to regain strength and gain weight in preparation to try the whole thing over again.

I just learned today that Steve is back at Duke, after he lost the feeling in his right side. It turns out that the leukemia spread to his spinal fluid and also caused tumors on his skin. The doctors are afraid it will get to his brain so they started giving him chemo directly in his spinal fluid. In addition to all that, the he recently developed pneumonia in the remaining lung and that has recently worsened.

I am not sure how much more this poor guy and his family will have to go through, and things don’t sound good – as positive as we like to stay. But I do know it is a vivid reminder of why we need to continue to race for a cure. Please say a prayer for Steve and/or send him positive vibrations.

Okay - Now my blogger holiday officially (re)starts!