Primary Myelofibrosis

So long story short, after a bunch of tests with Dr. Li, one of them being dude hammering thru my hip bones in hopes to get a bone marrow sample, they determined that I have Primary Myelofibrosis.  It's not cancer, but it's under the cancer umbrella.  This is so it gets the funding that cancer gets.  Myelofibrosis can and will turn into Myeloid Leukemia, which is a killer.  Anyway, the video above is a pretty good description of what's going on.  Then this one below kinda painful to watch but it actually talks about how to treat it.  

HELLO

Friday October 10th, Milo gets out of school early and asks me to pick him up at school with our bikes on the Burban so we can go rip around TOGETHER at Duthie Hill bike park in Issaquaw.  Really, my 14 year old wants to just hang out with his pops, hit jumps and shit?  I'm all in.  We roll out there, warm up with some mellow jump lines and fun runs.  Lil dude see's this run called 12 pack or something, that's a line thru the woods with 12 sets of bmx style double jumps.  Not huge, not small, but kind of a technical run as there's lots of turning, jumping and pumping going on.  Milo says "Dad, follow me thru, let's train this thing."  "You sure?  You think I got this?"  "No problem Dad" was all I needed to hear.  Well I made it thru the first jump, into the second set and went over the bars and got pinned into the berm.  Shit knocked the crap out of me, and the picture above is me turning off the GoBro while I'm sweating like a Pollack in a spelling bee because I'm going into shock or something.
Milo ended up coming back to check on me (he got a full pull thru the 12 pack) offered me water and then had me film him going thru the line.

 

Well we got done with that, and I decided it was time to seek medical attention.  I called Lisa, and she made and appointment at Urgent Care because we were going to save $ on the ER charges.  After driving thru Seattle traffic for an hour we get there.  Dude does an x-ray and determines I have a broken rib but he see's some scarring on my bones and suggests I go to the ER room to make sure I'm not bleeding internally and to see what's up with all the scarring on my bones.

I get an MRI and some drugs and the news that I in fact have 4 broken ribs, a chipped scapula and an enlarged spleen.  I also am given orders to go back to Dr. Li because I have Leukemia like shit going on.  Either Myleofibrosis or Leukemia are what it's looking like at this point. 

Dr. Li

So we made an appointment with Dr. Henry Li, a dude that specializes in blood cancers and a graduate of Stanford and Harvard.  Lisa and I are looking at each other on the drive in thinking to ourselves "WTF is going on?"  Doc did blood work, asked a bunch of questions on my health, how I was feeling, energy levels, loss of appetite, bone pain, sudden weight loss, all that shit.  None of it applied to me except the weight loss.  But after we told him that I work out, dropped gluten from most of our diet, and cut back on booze, combo'd with my age, Doc said that things sounded fine.  The problem was that I was low on my red blood cell count and my cells were irregularly shaped.  Lisa ratted me out to him, telling him how much Ibuprofen I like to consume on a daily level.  Armed with this info, Dr. said I had a hole in my stomach and was trickling blood out of it.  Dude pulled my Ibuprofen card and put me on an acid blocker to stop the bleeding, as well as told me to take iron pills.  He wanted to see me in a month or two to redo some blood work and when we walked out of the doctors office, we felt like we dodged a bullet. 

Warning sign

Lisa made me an appointment with the dermatologist to get some prescription shit for my snowboard boot fungus and toenail fungus.  She was tired of me covering my nasty ass toenails with black nail polish.  Dr. said that the only way to really get rid of toenail fungus was to get on this drug called Lanolin for 3-4 months.  Dr. said the shit was pretty gnarly on your liver so he had blood work to make sure everything was good.  I left with a prescription for the drug and the instructions to start taking the drug.  Dr. would call if anything came up with my blood work.  The next day I took the first pill, and later that day I saw a voice mail from a number I didn't recognize.  When I listened to it, it said "Hello John, this is Dr. Stidels office.  There is some things that came up in your blood work, so DO NOT start taking the drug.  We'd like you to go see Dr. Henry Li at the Polyclinic to talk to you about your blood work.
Cool.

Way back

The question started back in 2012 when a group of us from college got together at Sticks house as we were back in MA.  We were drinking beers, talking shit, and then I said it to the group.  "Okay, who's gonna get it out of us?  2 out of the 6 of us are gonna get cancer, who's it gonna be?"  Not the rad question to pose while drinking...fyi.