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Gayle Serls
Gayle Serls was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic
leukemia (ALL) in 1995 and, with no other options, received a cord
blood transplant ten months later from an unrelated donor in a procedure
performed by Dr. Mary Laughlin at Duke University Medical Center
(Dr. Laughlin now directs the bone marrow transplantation service at Ireland Comprehensive Cancer Center in Cleveland, Ohio.) Gayle writes:
What I wanted to do was find the picture
of me, Matt, and Corbin at the beach on our summer vacation, about
two weeks before I was diagnosed. We always went to the same house
and we always had a picture of the three of us sitting on the
porch from year to year, a chronological depiction of some of
our best times together as a family. And I wanted to show the
picture of the three of us sitting together after "the ordeal" on my mother's front porch sitting in the swing; Matt all grown
up and handsome, and in that picture, about to graduate from college;
and Corbin, beautiful and about to enter college, and me in the
middle with a hand on each of them, just so aware of how much
I would have missed, and how much I love them and still want to
protect and guide them.
Who knew that it would take $250,000, ten months of day-to-day
treks to the hospital with "extended stay" for weeks
at a time, a whole new vocabulary that included words like,
cancer, why me?, leukemia, Philadelphia Chromosome, hematology-oncology, bone-marrow transplant, white-cell count, platelets,
Hickman catheter, chemotherapy, foreign-sounding names of drugs
and medicines, relapse, radiation (as in everyone leaves the room
except you and the big Death Ray Machine), and the word DEATH
applied to me (At my age? I was just getting started!)
Who knew what it would take to get
me from the beach that summer to the porch swing on my mother's
front porch five years later? Who knew that in seemingly one second,
my life as a person, friend, daughter, sister, and, most importantly
as a mother, could have been over with, finished, done for, gone
less than a year from diagnosis. Who knew how much it would cost,
how many doctors, nurses, technicians, attendants, drugs, lab
workers, and researchers it would take to give me a chance to
live? Who knew that a cord blood transplant would be my answer
to all of those questions? Someone in research knew - more specifically,
someone at the NYBC knew that I was going to get a fighting chance.
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