The first post to a new blog or social medium is always the most difficult as I never know what to say. I guess I'll just introduce myself for now. I'm Marina, I'm 32, and I'm a teacher, or at least I WAS a teacher until I got stuck being hospitalized with cancer. Acute myeloid leukemia, to be exact.
At the end of February, I had horrible mouth pain from a mouth ulcer and sudden and random gum issues that wouldn't go away that turned into what felt like the flu. I thought at first the flu-like symptoms were a side effect of the antibiotics I was taking for the gum problems, but then I started becoming constantly short of breath. At first I didn't pay much attention to that as I had been feeling short of breath for a few months now, and I've had asthma as a kid and even though it hasn't bothered me in YEARS, I just figured that's what it was and kept telling myself that I had to go pick up a new asthma pump one of these days.
Well, one day I had no energy at all and ended up sleeping the entire day--yup, all 24 hours of it. I got up the next day, took a shower, became extremely short of breath again, and noticed my fingernails were blue. In a panic I jumped out of the shower and saw my gums and lips turning grey. Luckily my husband was home and he called a taxi and we rushed to the ER of the Royal Victoria Hospital. (We didn't bother with an ambulance as we live mere minutes from the hospital.) I got seen pretty fast as I was short of breath, and once I was laid down on a stretcher I was able to catch my breath again and I felt much better.
The doctors thought it might be a blood clot and did a blood test which resulted in some SERIOUS concern from them, to the point that they redid the test, telling me they must have made a mistake, as the results didn't make sense. The second test lead them to come running back, rushing me into isolation where my husband had to wear a gown and mask to stay with me and I was immediately hooked up to IV. The doctors who came to see me were eerily concerned and serious and told me I was extremely, extremely sick and would have to stay at the hospital for a few days.
I was very confused as I felt mostly fine and had no idea what was going on. As it turned out, my blood cell counts were ridiculously, dangerously low, and I would have to have a biopsy done. They prepared a room for me on the hematology/oncology floor where I got a blood transfusion, and the next morning I got my bone marrow extracted for the biopsy. They had told me results could take days, but it only took them a few hours to discover it was leukemia.
So now I'm trying to adjust to this brand new life out of nowhere. I've already had one round of chemo (it lasted 7 days), and I have to wait here for a few more weeks until my immune system grows back so that they can do another biopsy to see if it worked. Apparently the first wave of chemo doesn't often work, so it looks like I'll be stuck here for awhile! So I might as well start a blog.
Well, that's my story of how I ended up here. That's it for my first post!
No comments:
Post a Comment