Worries Part III… “How long do I have?”

Here’s one Leuk is really good at dogging you with:

“When will I die?”

Hey, no one knows when their time will be up or how they will go. So you have leukemia; it doesn’t mean its your only ticket outta here.

People with CLL can live 10 to 20 years and longer. And even if your time is shorter than most, take this advise from an old guy I found on a CLL discussion group:

Hi: I am 80 years old and have been living with CLL for 12 years. It is a wait and see kind of cancer and my feeling was that I was not going to worry about something I couldn’t do anything about. So I enjoyed these years and have been doing pretty good so far. I had a treatment of ritaxin/bendamustin in 2008 and showed good blood tests for 18 months. I repeated the treatment for 4 sessions in 2010 and again showed good blood tests and CAT scans. However, now I have a lumph node in the chest that developed into a Large B Cell lymphoma and am receiving R Epoch treatment. I am told this is a very curable cancer. My advise to you – enjoy your life, live it to the fullest, and if the CLL needs treatment, by all means get it. Until then, good luck and God Bless you.

Leuk can overpower your thoughts with worries of when you’ll be pushing up daises. But you could waste all your time worrying about loosing your life to Leukemia and then wind up getting creamed by a drunk driver. I guess St. Peter would have to forgive the profanity when you look back at those wasted years and yell “Holy Crap, what was I thinking!”

CLL has a better survival rate than most. The treatments can be tough, but it’s worth it to get the better hand over Leuk. Just remember, whenever and however you go, he can’t kill your hope if you never give it to him.