What’s on my Libby playlist these days? It’s Between Two Kingdoms by Suleika Jaouad.
It’s the story of her college life, young adulthood, and acute myeloid leukemia. A story of survival.
At the moment, I’m in the chapter where she goes through a bone marrow transplant. It is a grueling and isolating process.
Two of my support group friends have gone through this in the past year. 💔
I’ve been getting a lot of steps this month as we have our granddog for the month. He’s young and full of energy, and when I walk him, it’s kind of like waterskiing. I’m holding on, and he’s pulling, standing on 2 legs sometimes, darting after every squirrel or rabbit.
My old dog is more of a slow meanderer. He just wants to go slow and smell everything. He’s about 15 years old and getting to be a little hard of hearing.
So, I walk them separately.
Today I gave the old guy a treat. We went in the car (very exciting) to the park (really really exciting) which is across the street from a farm with lots of interesting cow and sheep smells. Dog heaven!
We started on the path and I noticed that the grass was a little dead along the edges. After a while I realized that it was probably just sprayed with herbicide… the line between dead and living grass was just too severe…
What do you think?
It’s a bummer 😕 because, of course, my dog would rather walk on the grass than the paved path. But I don’t want those chemicals on his paws!
Got home and saw this on Instagram.
My cousin asked me some questions about CLL this weekend, and it took me a while to recall the answers.
I realize that I’ve been focusing on lowering my toxin load and risk factors and healing my metabolic functions (a positive thing for me, my family, and hopefully you, too) instead of focusing on my disease (a negative thing that I can’t change).
Which is actually good from a stress-management perspective. 🧘♀️
Chronic lymphocytic leukemia is a cancer of the B cells, which are a type of white blood cell.
“Chronic” indicates that it is a lifelong condition, with no known cure.
“Lymphocytic” means that it involves a particular type of cell called the lymphocyte.
There are two main types of lymphocytes: B cells and T cells. B cells produce antibodies to attack bacteria, viruses, and toxins, while T cells destroy cells that have been taken over by viruses or become cancerous.
CLL is a dysfunction of the B cells.
“Leukemia” is a word for cancer of blood-forming tissues, including bone marrow. The word “leukemia” literally means “white blood” in Greek.
This is how CLL was explained to me by my doctor:
When a healthy person gets sick, the body sends out a variety of white blood cells to fight off the infection.
Some white blood cells are like army infantrymen — they go where they are told and do what they are told to do in order to fight the invader.
The B cell is like a Navy Seal. It goes in and locates the virus or germ, then rapidly tries a variety of ways to kill it. Once it succeeds in killing the invader, it sends a signal to the bone marrow, saying, “Make a million more cells that can kill the invader this way.” These cells are called activated B cells.
Once the invader is killed off and the virus or germ is conquered, there should be a signal that says a couple of things.
(I believe these are all sent by the B cell, but I’m not 100% sure.)
1. Thanks, bone marrow. You can stop making the activated cells now.
2. Thanks, activated cells. You can die off now. (This is called apoptosis, or “programmed cell death.”)
3. Thanks, immune system. You can relax now.
4. Let’s make some antibodies for future use.
So, in a person with CLL, these signals stop being sent. The activated B cells flood the bloodstream, and they don’t die off.
The very worst, most life-threatening part of having CLL is that those new antibodies are not being made. Thankfully, you still have the old ones that your body made when the B cells worked well.
My doctor told me that his little department of the cancer center lost the most patients during the covid pandemic, because this was a “novel” virus and most of them didn’t have antibodies similar to what was needed to fight the disease.
Another bad thing is that once you have CLL, you are more likely to develop another cancer. (It is closely correlated to skin cancer in men and women, and prostate cancer in men.)
The best thing about CLL is that it progresses very slowly. So you have a lot of time to make changes and figure things out.
The Cancer Canary 