14 years ago, my grandmother, Peggy Smith, was diagnosed with leukemia. I was four at the time, so my memory of this time period is nearly non-existent. Because I could not rely on my memories of her experience, I called her and asked about the experience.
My grandmother said she just “wasn’t feeling good” and was becoming progressively weaker. When she went to the doctor, her white blood counts were low on the blood test but her first doctor didn’t make any move to test for leukemia. Instead, my grandmother had to push to for further testing; she would have preferred to err on the side of caution. Her regular doctor replied sarcastically initially, saying, “Well, I have patients with lower counts than you. Maybe I should send them on to.” My grandmother’s thoughts on that? “Well then. Maybe you should.”
Eventually, she was sent on to an oncologist who tested bone marrow from her hip. My grandmother said, “That’s the test that really showed it” – she was diagnosed with hairy cell leukemia, so named because the cells look “fuzzy”.
After the diagnosis, she was put in the hospital for two weeks. For the first week, she was on twenty-four-hours-a-day-seven-days-a-week chemotherapy through an IV. For the second week, she was on a drug that helped her white blood cell count go back up from what the chemotherapy had lowered it too.
Luckily, and oddly, this wasn’t a story of stress or strong emotions or tension caused by cancer. My grandmother reports that she “just wasn’t stressed out about it.” That may be because she had so much support – my mother and I were living six hours away at the time, but my mother remembered to call my grandmother every day. Neighbors were also a source of support and my grandmother says she “always had lots of company.” It is also possible that she simply didn’t have time to be stressed out about herself; her nephew, my cousin, was undergoing treatment for much more severe leukemia at the same time which was the cause of his death at two years old. No matter what the cause, my grandmother seems to view her leukemia as something that just happened; it’s been 14 years and it hasn’t come back, and she stopped seeing her oncologist three years ago because she reports “he figured it would fine to let me go.”
-Natalie Hudson-Smith
