"Neither here nor there"

I am the less than 1% of Leukemia patients whose Leukemia presents NOT in the bone marrow or blood. It does confirm that this is very early on in my disease, but nothing has changed.

I realize you don't even know what it would have changed from. On Wednesday night I got the ALL diagnosis but it was too difficult to wrap my head around what treatment meant and then try to come up with a series of coherent sentances.

When you have Leukemia--when you have whacked out white blood cells--the answer is to kill ALL of your white blood cells, over and over. It doesn't matter how early on the Leukemia is or in how many places: it's all treated the same. The process is harsh and requires hospitalization. On Wednesday the 13th I'm checking into the hosptial, having a port put in my chest, and then they'll bombard my system with enough chemicals to kill me without actually having me die. Not to be melodramatic, but it breaks my heart to take my healthy body and put it through such intense punishment. I love my body and everything it does for me.

I stay in the hospital for a few days while they blast my system and then go home to recover. Once my body builds up new white blood cells, we go again. This will happen at least three times. Eventually, the chemo mellows and at the end I end up on "maintenance drugs" for the next few YEARS. You know what? I'm really angry about this. Really, really angry.

I was OK with having cancer, with losing my hair, with wrestling with my mortality. I am fucking pissed that I am about to lose a few months of my life to infirmary and that I am going to poison my body. NOT COOL.

There's so much to say and so many places to go with this, but for now I'm tired and sad and I don't want to think about it.

Tomorrow my Portland people are coming and we're going to tear it up. The theme of the weekend is "denial" as far as I'm concerned.