The Bad News…

So that night, after going to see the Doctor, I didn’t really think about what was wrong with me. Worse case scenario, I thought something was wrong with my spleen and I may have to get it removed. Of course I went to the internet and saw this wasn’t a huge deal, a person can live without his spleen, and thought that would be it. Well, it wasn’t it. That next day on July 3, 2009 the phone wrung at about 9:10. It was Doctor Eberhard and he didn’t sound too happy. The first thing he said is “ Jason, I’m sorry to have to tell you this over the phone. But you don’t have Mono…” I said, well great. “ He said not exactly…..At that point I put the phone a speaker so that my wife could hear what he was saying. He said “ again, I’m sorry to tell you this over the phone, but I feel like we need to find a specialist as soon as possible and want to get your permission to do so” I said, ok, what are we dealing with. “ He said Jason, you have Leukemia.” ……You hear about people who have something bad happen to them or they hear some bad news and their whole life flashes before their eyes…..well, I now know what that means. My whole life came to a stop. My wife began to cry, I began to cry, I told the doctor to do what he had to do, but to find me a specialist. I hung up the phone, and I could hardly breath. I started to hug my wife and I promised her that I would not let this kill me. That I would fight this with every muscle I had….As husband, we all make promises to our wife’s. Most of the time, if not all, we have complete control of those promises of whether or not they can happen. I had just promise my wife something I had no control of. And she believed me. This was the one promise in 16 year I had better live up to. I had to fight this. I have too much to lose. I would not let my kids go on in this life without a dad. This could not be happening. This can’t happen.

The next hour felt like a week. I didn’t know what I should do. Should I start calling family? Do I need to cancel business meetings I had scheduled for that coming week. Do I tell my boss? Do I tell the kids? What do I tell the kids? All I could do was wait for the next call from my doctor to tell me the next steps. Within a hour, Dr. Eberhard called back. He told me that he did find a specialist at the Utah Cancer Specialist. Because it was the weekend before the 4th of July, that his offices were closed until Monday. But he did have a chance to look over my blood results and he was about 99% sure I had a Leukemia call Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML). He was told by the specialist to tell us that it is a type of Leukemia, that with the proper medication, can be manageable. He also said that not worry and to try and have a good weekend….(that part always makes me smile). Well, as you can imagine, the next 3 days was hell. The hardest part was trying to not think about it until we found out more information. Luckily, we have a friend who is a Doctor, that was a great help in finding out as much information about CML as possible. By the time we got to the specialist office on Monday, we had as much information as we needed to ask the doctor the right questions.