Care Packages for Newly Diagnosed Leukemia Patients

Hello friends!

Birthdays are always bittersweet. A celebration of another year around the sun. Hurrah. A reminder that another year has come and gone.

It’s a time to reflect on the last year and a dive into what it is I want out of my upcoming year. These last couple of birthdays have meant something very different.

Previous years included a count of additional wrinkles, extra pounds, gray hairs. Those things no longer hold the same significance. I’m here. I’m alive.

I will be fifty four years old on Friday. How lucky is that? You need only turn on the tv, open a news app, ask dear friends whose spouses have passed or the mothers I know who have lost a child.

When I sat in the hospital fighting for my life, that’s what I would think about. Not “woe is me I have cancer.”

I would think how very lucky I was to have gotten this far. To have science on my side, amazing treatments, good healthcare (what a privilege) and to have been given the gift of fighting for my life while so many others had died of an accident, an illness, a shooting, a hostile attack, a retaliatory war.

I have been trying to decide what I want to do for myself this year.

I had a fabulous doctor’s appointment this week. My numbers are good. It was an appointment filled with much laughter, sharing of personal passions and a conversation about my stem cell donor who we recently met and someday soon I will write about.

Very different from our first meeting together the day I was admitted to the hospital. I was terrified, eyes darting around the room looking for comfort, hope. Staring into the face of a young man in front of me, my new doctor, not much older than our oldest son, for any clues in his eyes, his smile.

I found comfort with him often. He was honest. Luckily he was able to tell me there was hope.

Comfort was found in a nurse’s story of someone who had come before me and was now thriving. It was found in the sweet gal who came in every morning at 7:00 am to clean and genuinely asked how I was doing and tell me how strong I was.

It was found in making friends as you pushed your IV cart with swaying bags of treatments and medications garnering the only exercise you could. My leukemia buddies, Anne and Chris. Newly made forever friends.

It was found with a blogger I’d known for years online introducing me to her lifelong friend, Stacy, who had been through exactly what I was going through (and then some). She was and is everything to me in this process.

It was found in the texts and direct messages I received by the hundreds. In dear friends delivering food to my family. The one thing I longed most to maintain for them.

It was found in a care package brought in for me one of my early days with socks and coloring books, a journal, chapstick and many other small gifts someone before me found helpful and had delivered.

Leukemia isn’t like other cancer diagnoses. You don’t go home. You are admitted immediately to the hospital and you begin a long grueling treatment process. My first stay was four weeks, my second, five. I was lucky, those are short stays compared to many.

Thinking back on it all has made me realize what I want to do for myself this year on my birthday. I can’t repay all the comforts I received from so many, but I can pay them forward in a small way.

I’ve decided I will create a care package a month this year so that at least one person who finds themselves in this same situation will have comfort in the form of everything I remember receiving and needing during those first weeks when the whole world has exploded into a million fragmented pieces.

I plan to create one a month from my own funds. BUT, if you are interested in contributing to my birthday fund, I’ve set up a gofundme. I’ll create additional care packages with any donations collected. No pressure at all. We all have things we contribute to. But if you are looking for a way to give back, you can find one here.