Philadelphia Chromosome

Not only do i have leukaemia, but shortly after I was diagnosed, the doctors found a disease on top of my disease.  It is a very rare condition, called Philadelphia Chromosome.  Less than 3% of the population gets it, but lucky me I get this one and cancer.  In the past ten years there has only been one other person that I am aware of, that has received this diagnosis.  My doctor has only ever treated one other person with the Chromosome, and that's the only person that I have heard of with this disease,ever.  If I had this three years ago, I would have been as good as dead, they only recently came out with the cure.  The change in technology in these past few years has been absolutely incredible, and even though I am very glad that they found a cure, it still complicates absolutely everything in my treatment plan.  The Chromosome makes it a lot more difficult to cure the leukaemia, so I get double the amount of chemotherapy, that a regular leukaemia patient would have, and I have to take two nasty chemotherapy pills everyday.  Because I am on so much chemo, it makes it really hard for me to recover on time.  My treatment plan says I will be on chemotherapy for 3 years, but as the days go by it seems to be getting longer, rather than shorter, every time I don't recover fast enough for my next dose of chemo.  It has been really hard going through this disease, because even though I'm always surrounded by tones of people with cancer, nobody has the same kind as me, I couldn't relate to anyone. I have always felt alone, and very different.  It was also scary because nobody even told me what happened to the other patient that had the same thing as me, all I knew was that he and I were the only ones, and he was diagnosed within the past ten years, I didn't have much to go by.  A lot of the times when i was in the hospital for days on end, a nurse would look at me and tell me that he's the only one shes ever seen throw up as much as I did.  At this point I was very curious about who he was, and if he made it out okay or not, but they couldn't tell me because of privacy reasons.  Today when I was sitting in the hospital, waiting for my blood counts(I'll explain those in a different post), my mom started a conversation with a boy next to me, I have seen him around every once and a while but never really took the time to have a decent conversation with him.  She asked his age, and what type of cancer he has, he said "almost 17, and leukaemia as well as a rare disease called Philadelphia Chromosome".  I couldn't believe my ears.   We sat there and talked for like an hour, it was so nice to finally not be alone.  I am so glad that I now have some one to talk to, and relate to.  I can't believe that for the 7 months I've had cancer I've never met him, but I'm so glad I did.  I hope we stay in touch.