At Seth’s one year checkup we found a blood anomaly, after talking to a specialist in Chapel Hill, it turned out to be AML Leukemia.
So far we have completed two 30 day rounds of inpatient hospital care, with another 2 more to go. This is typically 10 days of chemotherapy followed by 20 days of waiting for you immune system to recover, and then you get about a week to 10 days at home before you start the next round.
My Wife’s and I’s jobs have been really great and understanding. They both have let us work 100% remote during this so we can be at the hospital with Seth full time. My manager also was willing to work with me in many other ways to make this as smooth as possible and put the focus on Seth getting better. In each of our performance reviews he has always asked how Seth, and I, and my Wife were doing, and making that all that really matters. I cannot express my gratitude to Redhat enough, it truly is an amazing place to work.
We found out this week that the last round was very successful and that Seth is now in “remission” which is great. There still is a big chance it will come back within the next 6 months – 2 years, but if we make it past 2 years after we complete the treatments, then we can celebrate. So there is definitely a light at the end of the tunnel right now.
A bone marrow match is the preferred way to treat this at the end of chemo, as it makes the chance of cancer coming back very low. Unfortunately for Seth this did not happen, he has no siblings, and his ethnic makeup is in the minority, making the chances of finding a match that much harder than it already is.
The chances to find a match are around one in a million, but we have millions of people in America alone, and billions in the world, so it isn’t as hopeless as you think. While it is very unlikely Seth’s chances for a match will change, the chance that you could be the match for someone else is still there. I know how much a match would mean to us, so my family is signing up at bethematch.org in the hopes that we will be a match for some other Family going through the same thing.
It is free to sign up, and the test is not physically painful. They send you a kit with cotton swabs, you swab your cheeks for 30 seconds, and send it back in. Please consider signing up for bethematch.org to be somebody’s hero, and help save a life.
They are looking ideally for 18-44 year old people, with 61 being the cutoff limit. They also want you to be within a fairly generous weight limit