On the day I am writing this,

29 years old, 2.5 years from allogeneic bone marrow transplant, in early relapse of Acute Myeloid Leukemia.  Hence, the blog.

I wrote all sorts of things when I was younger.  There is a shelf of journals in our living room to chronicle trips, travels and the seemingly trivial, daily goings on. Writing feels rusty now.  The retinal hemorrhages sustained in the days before diagnosis and the fine motor side effects of medications limited its efficacy.  On relapse though, I suppose it is time.  There does not need to be a dream of publishing a groundbreaking account of the terrible happenings or the terribly romantic story, but it is time to be forthcoming.

Positive thinking the first time required some serious, real-time glossing over of the gritty details.  These unavoidable details came around to bite me in the ass, and knocked me on said ass, in the wake of wonderful news of sustained remission two years out from transplant.  Honestly, the sudden onset of post traumatic stress and depression frightened me more than the even more sudden news of relapse.

And I thought, “what do they say about trying the same things over and over again and expecting a different result?”

I could not keep working the same way I had been, so I unceremoniously and unprofessionally cut way, way back.  Messy at first and would not have been possible without my incomparable husband and magnanimous bosses.  Then, the feeling I have had a few times before: coalescing possibilities from an open-ended course of action and inexplicable alignment until…

Or including? Maybe relapse of my Leukemia is part of it? Maybe I am just stubborn enough to manifest this? Who’s to say.  Regardless, here we are.  A therapist and antidepressant medication continues to soothe the emotional backlash. Perhaps, a second bone marrow transplant will stick long enough for medicine to catch-up to what lasting remission requires in my case.  Same disease, maybe a different type of me, so I guess we’ll see.