Leukemia Has Forced Me Into a Life Audit
I picked the wrong week to get cancer, I thought. I gazed over the downtown buildings of Chicago. On a normal June day, the skyscrapers would shine bright in summer sun. But a veil of grey smoke and soot had settled over the city–courtesy of fires thousands of miles away in Canada. In my office, people hacked and coughed in their cubes. That day, Chicago had the worst air quality in the world. The gloom mirrored my mood.
I was coming off a phone call with my doctor.
“Blah blah, high lymphocytes, low neutrophils, lympho-proliferative, blah blah,” he said. His lips flapped like sausages. I couldn’t comprehend what he was saying.
Did he mean I actually had a disease? What the fuck is he talking about?
Like the forest fires a thousand miles away, the doctors told me there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn’t genetic. They didn’t know how I got it. It had an exotic name: Large granular lymphocytic T-cell leukemia, or T-LGL for short.
Like the forest fires a thousand miles away, the doctors told me there was nothing I could do about it.
