My name is Tessa Blanton. I want to thank our good friend Phil Tran for creating this go fund me page for my boyfriend Phillip.
Phillip Wood is a 30-year-old army veteran who is fighting APL Leukemia (I will go into detail to describe this condition further. Phil received his diagnosis on April 25th, 2018. For the past 36 days, Phillip has been at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Cancer Hospital for daily Chemotherapy and Arsenic treatments.
Phil currently lives in Southport, N.C. with me and our Border Collie, Stanikin Skywalker (AKA Stan); we live a quiet life, working and spending time with close friends whenever we can. Even those outside of the family know just how tenacious, bright, and happy-go-lucky Phillip can truly be. He always makes others happy with his presence, and his laugh is both contagious and unmistakable, even in a room full of people. From the very beginning to the last few days of his hospitalization, Phillip has remained confident and determined to fight his cancer head on, until it is gone.
Though Phillip is a positive force in this universe, it only took two days for the Leukemia to hit him, hard. Sundays are the only day of the week that he has off from work to spend with me, Stan, his friends; we all spent that day laughing, and he worked on his Jeep. The following day, Monday, Phil felt strange and had a sore throat, but he went into work at America's Mattress anyway, refusing to take a sick day. Tuesday, the presence of a deadly illness was undeniable. Phillip was vomiting blood, had blood trickling from his gums and his throat which was so sore that he couldn't even speak. The local Emergency Room treated him with antibiotics for an infection on his tonsils, but also went on to do some blood work.
Normal platelet (what makes your blood clot) count for an adult male is between 150 thousand and 400 thousand.
Phillip's platelets were at 5 thousand which is life threatening.
He was immediately transported to a larger hospital for further blood-work. I was so scared for him. Not knowing what is going on is scarier than anything, or so I thought. His blood labs revealed something much scarier than the lack of platelets: Leukemic Cells. In a matter of hours, he was transported to UNC Cancer hospital where he has been participating in treatment ever since. Hearing the word Leukemia was something I thought I'd never hear. Phil was still seemingly energetic and actually told the doctors, “Hey thanks for the antibiotics, I feel great. I'm ready to go home now.” Unfortunately his mental strength didn't exactly match his physical.
Let me tell you a little bit about APL Leukemia. Acute promyelocytic leukemia (APL) is a subtype of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a cancer of the white blood cells. In APL, there is an abnormal accumulation of immature granulocytes called promyelocytes. It's distinguished from other forms of AML by its responsiveness to all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) therapy. This illness without treatment has a median survival rate of less than a week. When the doctors told us he had days to a week to live without treatment, my heart dropped. I was a mess and had to get out of the room asap because I didn't want Phil to see me cry. As hours passed and more information was given to us about his specific Leukemia I became much more hopeful. Thankfully! With todays treatments of ATRA therapy along side small doses of Arsenic trioxide this leukemia is very curable, with a 90% remission rate.
The 36 days Phillip has spent at the UNC Cancer Hospital are just a small amount of the long and arduous journey to come. At least two more years of his life will be spent fighting his illness, missing work, traveling to hospitals that are 45 minutes to 3 hours from where we live, and accruing even more medical debt through treatments and medication in an attempt to live a long and happy life. Although Phil is a veteran and is enrolled in Veterans Health care, there are loopholes they have found in order not to pay for anything. This ,we are still working on, and has been proven to be an unnecessary stress on our past month of hardship. We are not giving up.
We are asking for your help to make sure that Phillip can continue his journey and fight with APL Leukemia without added stress of debt. Even though you may not be able to give a lot, every bit counts and adds up.
No matter what you feel compelled to donate to this brave soldier, every single bit of it is significant, appreciated, and will be going towards making his life better to live these next few years and years after.
For the 36 days, Phillip was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Cancer Hospital for intensive Chemotherapy and Arsenic treatments. In early June he was released and we are back home in Southport. He still has 2 years and 3 months of treatment.