After cancer the fear never leaves you, but she’s fighting back
In 1988, I celebrated my thirty-first birthday in a hospital bed, convinced it would be my last.
Days earlier, I’d woken from a coma after two grand mal seizures—caused by three months of chemotherapy for the rare leukemia that had overtaken my body.
Doctors used the word “grim.” My father bought me a cemetery plot.
One month later in May, I received an experimental bone marrow transplant at Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto—a long shot with less than an eight per cent chance of success. On that day, my sister Mary’s liquid bone marrow hung from an IV pole, its contents dripping from a bag into a central vein in my chest through a Hickman line. I watched it and felt something I hadn’t felt in months… Hope.
Three months later, I was in remission, but my face—and my body—turned purple. It was Graft versus Host Disease (GvHD), my doctor said, a post-transplant complication where Mary’s donated marrow attacked my organs. That’s how I learned my skin was the largest organ in my body. The GvHD also appeared in my liver. Later it would show up in my mouth and the small airways in my lungs. If not controlled, GvHD could be life threatening. My doctor monitored it regularly.
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Photo: Rene Johnson/Toronto Star
