Happy birthday, Jo Ann! You mean way more to me than any peek into our story can say, but here ya go anyway… Stepping out from the bone marrow transplant clinic at UCSF into the jam of bodies crisscrossing Parnassus Avenue, there was only one thing on my mind – everything. Should I just get back to work and let …
Black, brown, yellow, mixed-race, shame, stigma, religion, family or none, bone marrow challenges due to race, why we (people of color) don’t participate in existing programs, and how we won’t go down like death by a million papercuts! Oh, we went there and back and we’re ready to do it again! Yesterday, at #CancerCON in Denver, Colorado, we convened the …
After an exhausting eight hours of pulmonary (lung) function testing, the head pulmonologist at one of the country’s top pulmonary function labs in California, handed me the written results of my performance, and explained the series of tables and graphs. “You lost 40% of your lung tissue, and according to these tests, the 60% of tissue that you do have …
When I first thought about pursuing a PhD on surviving young adult cancer, I checked out what had already been done, Googling “young adult cancer survivorship,” “young adult cancer psychosocial,” and “aya cancer social work.” (AYA stands for adolescent and young adult.) The first search term produced 4 out of the first 10 articles authored by BJ Zebrack, the second …
Robert Houser is the mega talent who shot pics of my baldness in the Spring of 2011, while I was deep in the middle of the bone marrow transplant process. In the process, Bob won the award for Creativity in Photography from Communication Arts Magazine, the largest trade journal of visual communications, for this image (to the right) that he …