Over the past year I have learned more about blood cancers than I ever really wanted to know.
My speech is now sprinkled with terms like Philadelphia chromosomes, BCR’s, ABL’s and tyrosine kinase inhibition. And I carry that vision of my chromosome-9 and chromosome-22 switching portions of themselves with one another leaving me with nothing to show for it but an overcrowded white blood cell party going on in my house.
I have become so emboldened with my facility for tongue twisting taxonomy that I can safely spend time with my hematologist debating stoichiometry, lateral reactive pathways and distribution inhibition without guilt.
Big words notwithstanding, though, I have no control over the outcome of the targeted chemotherapeutic treatment.
I take the meds as prescribed setting into motion what seems to me, as a chemist, to be a Rube Goldberg contraption of reactions that, in the end, force my wayward chromosomes to make nice – even temporarily.
It works or it doesn’t.
Right now, it doesn’t and that, too, is more than I really ever wanted to know.
