At the age of 18 I was diagnosed with Acute lymphoblastic leukemia. It progressed pretty quickly; I went from having little pain to being completely immobile. I had to drive a couple hours away from home just to be diagnosed.
After three different bone marrow extractions at three different hospitals, it was confirmed that I would be receiving chemotherapy. Thinking back to the time is so traumatizing and it still feels like an out of body experience. I spent my first month in the hospital and 2 out of those 4 weeks I was completely unconscious on morphine because of my scared bone marrow. It was hard to get the doctors on my insurance to do anything about my issue until it got to the point where I would have to be bed ridden. I lost all the muscles on my legs and so I was hardly able to even get up and walk by myself.
After two and a half years I was cleared to go back to living my life, but that only lasted so long. A couple months after I reached remission, I started getting bumps that became red and swollen on my legs. The doctors brushed it off even though I was in remission for my cancer and instead of going locally I had to drive an hour away where my oncologist was.
With that they gave me medication to help with the pain the bumps were causing and then after some time decided that I had to be admitted. After a couple days in the hospital my oncologist told me that they found AML through my tests and because of that my ALL relapsed so I would be fighting two cancers.
I went home to pack my things for a one month stay in the hospital. I received chemo and multiple other tests so that I could eventually be sent to a cancer hospital for a bone marrow transplant. Before I could get my transplant, I went home for a couple of days and unfortunately got the Corona virus. They had to delay my transplant and instead of getting it in January, I got it in March of 2021.