#BCAM is the hash tag for Blood Cancer Awareness Month.
So this is the first full day of my MPN. Friday September 8th, 2017. TGIF. The people at work are pretty observant. I went from no doctors visits for a year to having a long stream of them so they always ask how the appointment went. I debated about telling them anything but since I had never heard of the disease before I figured I would let the cat out of the bag to help raise awareness. Generally in my experience if it doesn’t affect somebody we know then most people are not prone to know anything about it. I am the same way.
I work in a shop environment, basically all males. I manage a few guys in a shop and in the mornings we kind stand around before the buzzer and talk, drink coffee and eat sausage biscuits. As soon as I walked up to the group one of my guys asked how everything went. I then started to explain that I had an MPN and what it means to my understanding anyway. I explained I am still learning myself so there was not a lot I could explain.
Of course I told my boss what is going on because it means I will be missing work on occasion, he is pretty understanding and supportive. Then a while later another co-worker in another department heard from someone else and then another, then another. I explained as much as I could and honestly all this prompted this section of my website and my first post was backdated to the day I was diagnosed.
Lunch time came and I went to lunch with one of my team in the shop. He’s a good guy and one that I would also consider a friend. He was pretty quiet on the way to the fish place. After we got our food ordered we sat down to wait on it and he started asking more questions. He asked if it was just a blood disorder or whether it was considered a cancer. I explained that to my understanding it is technically a cancer as it is a condition that causes extra cellular growth in the bone marrow but that it’s not cancer like most of us think about it. While there can be complications from it later they still expect a long, mostly normal life.
The rest of the day was pretty normal except I wanted to stay active, I didn’t much want to sit at the computer so I helped the guys in the shop as much as I could. I think that helped keep my mind off of things a bit.
Skip ahead to today, 9/10/2017. I am working on a truck recently acquired, old 92 F350 with a 7.3l diesel. It was purchased as a farm truck, to haul the tractor and all that jazz around but it has an oil leak that has yet to be found. I get a text from my mother kind of lecturing me on not telling her and her reading here on the website. My family lives on the other side of the country from me and we don’t really talk all that often and we see each other even less. I explained to her that the post was the best way that I knew to get the information out there and to help educate by providing places on the issue and that explaining it over and over again to everyone would get pretty tiresome plus I do not want to explain anything incorrectly. She asked if I had told my father, I said no that I had not told anyone else in the family. I want to learn more about it before having to explain it to everyone hence the article I made and this section on the website. To be quite honest putting my thoughts on paper (computer) have always been the best way for me to deal with something.