How Our Lives Were Changed

In 2006, while away at school in Virginia, I started noticing weird allergies I never experienced before – swelling after I ate chocolate, strange bruises.  I just thought it was because I was living in a different environment. After classes, I tried to keep in shape by running and playing basketball but found myself short of breath and easily tired.  I just thought it was because I had been studying too much and was out of shape.  A few months later, while I was on a six-week pharmacy rotation back home in California, I started to feel more and more fatigued. Family members commented on how pale I looked. I just attributed the change to staying indoors all day and not getting much sun.

The night before I was supposed to start interning at Fountain Valley Hospital’s pharmacy, my nose started bleeding profusely. As a child, nose bleeds were common for me, so I thought nothing of it.  After about an hour, the bleeding didn’t stop. I realized something was wrong and rushed to the local emergency room. While in the ER, blood tests were done and the nose bleed eventually stopped. 

When the blood test results came back, they quickly isolated me in a private room and made everyone who came in wear masks. According to my test results, I had no platelets left in my blood and all of my other blood cells were critically low. The attending ER doctor walked into my room, casually said, “You probably have leukemia”, and continued on his way with no explanation. Don’t they teach bedside manners in medical school?

I was ultimately admitted into the hospital for more testing and the first of many bone marrow biopsies to come. Two days after the bone marrow biopsy results came back, the oncologist came in and told me, “There is good news…You have leukemia, but it can be cured”.  This was the beginning of my first 36-day stay at Fountain Valley Hospital as a patient, and not as a pharmacy intern as planned.

For the next 16 months, I underwent five rounds of chemotherapy. For each round, I was hospitalized for at least 30 days. It could be said that if anything could happen to me, it did. I suffered numerous infections and almost every organ in my body was affected by the chemo – lungs, liver, pancreas, stomach.

After a long journey and missing out on another year of returning to school, I finished my last round of chemotherapy in August 2008.  I felt good, I felt ready to return to my life. Although I was disappointed to have to defer another year of school, I took advantage of the time off and returned to spending my time with my family, friends and I started bicycling to regain my strength. After months of training, I finished a 100-mile bicycling marathon in Palm Springs in February 2009. Three days later, my doctor told me my leukemia had resurfaced.