This next story from the series "Real Lives. Real Stories. Real Families." belongs to Paul. Paul was living in Arizona with his wife soon to be celebrating his 60th birthday when he started to have sinus infections pretty regularly which led to him finding out that he had Leukemia. This is his story: "In March of 2015, I went to my general practitioner as I had a sinus infection. Unfortunately, this was not my first sinus infection. You see, I had been getting them pretty regularly for six months. So this time when my doctor wrote me the prescription for antibiotics, he also told me that I should have a physical.
Before I went in for the physical, I thought they would do a lot of different tests. To my surprise, they only drew blood. When my bloodwork came back, my results were borderline normal. So I was told to come back in 6 months to be checked again. Unfortunately, when I went back, my bloodwork was no longer normal, my pallets had decreased and monocytes increased. I was told that I had to go see a hematologist. When I called to schedule an appointment, I heard “Ironwood Cancer Center” and was taken aback. As I had lost my mother to cancer at the age of 15, cancer was always very scary to me.
When I got there, more blood was taken and I was sent to the first of my 8 bone marrow biopsies. When those results came back in November 2015, it came with devastating news - I had Leukemia. My only chance of survival was a bone marrow transplant. Fortunately, they were able to find me three different potential donors - two that were domestically located and were 9 out of 10 genetic matches and one that was international and was a perfect 10 out of 10. The 10 out of 10 donor agreed to donate their stem cells and my transplant was done on February 25, 2016. But sadly, my story didn’t end there as the following year, I needed a transfusion. (Continued in comments)