Environmental exposure and cancer - an update

I know a lot of you have been wondering what's been going on cancer-wise around here since I haven't talked about it in a while. In fact, it's been about a year since I've given you an update. For those of you who are newer readers, my husband was diagnosed with multiple myeloma 2.5 years ago, a type of leukemia and his is, unfortunately, a fairly aggressive one at that. You can read all the gory details in the back posts.

Multiple myeloma is fairly rare in young people (my husband was 37 when he was diagnosed) and is generally only found in the over 65 set. However, in the last few years, the incidence of multiple myeloma in younger people has been on the rise, particularly among fire fighters and, to some degree, the people that helped with rescue and cleanup from 9/11. What this may indicate is that environmental exposure to certain toxic chemicals, coupled with genetic susceptibility may be the culprit in this rise.

My husband is no firefighter but worked in biotechnology for many years, exposed to a number of pretty nasty chemicals, benzene being one of them. It is suspected that benzene exposure may be a trigger for this type of cancer. It would be easy to pin blame on that, but really, they just don't know. As we find out all manner of risks associated with toxins in the environment and, as exposure increases and builds up in our bodies, I don't doubt that we'll see an increase in cancers of the like never seen before.

Anyway, I don't want to relive all the early days of my husband's diagnosis that I chronicled on this blog because I don't like talking about it. It was an extremely difficult time. But the long and short of it is that in 2008 my husband had tandem stem cell transplants because chemotherapy wasn't working for him and, given how aggressive his cancer was, it was the best method of getting him even close to remission. Tandem stem cell transplants are not for the weak of heart because you are doing two stem cell transplants back-to-back. In his case, about 9 weeks apart.

That was almost a year and a half ago. Last week he went in for his week long long-term follow-up back at the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance. After running a multitude of tests on him, he's still showing low levels of cancer in his blood and bone marrow. This is not at all surprising (and we already knew this) because he is still on immunosuppressants while his body and the donor transplant get used to each other. They will be weaning him off of the immunosuppressants to maximize the graft versus leukemia effect. Essentially, letting the donor immune system wipe out the rest of the cancer. There may be negative effects of doing this - it's a balancing game as you don't want the graft to attack healthy skin and organs. But, you also don't want the cancer to have free reign either.

There are additional treatments that can be administered once he's off immunosuppressants. Some have the potential of pushing him into remission. However, they were very clear that there is no cure for myeloma and that they view it as a chronic disease to be managed. Unfortunately, the recurrence rate post-transplant at the five year mark is 60%. The odds aren't necessarily in our favor, but they never have been.

The fact that he's still around, able to work full-time, take classes and generally live a fairly decent life is beyond my expectations when we were initially told that life expectancy was only 2 - 3 years even with treatment. We are almost at that threshold and things are looking good for the short term. We just live each day hoping for the best, because that's really all we can do. It would be easy to get wrapped up in the negative side of things and that's not to say that we never do. But, one thing that it has done has been to change the way we live. We don't have the luxury of planning things for the future. So, we have to live for today.

I'm personally doing things that I never would have before, things that I would have been afraid of doing before. Not that I have lost that fear, but I'm more willing to push myself beyond my usual boundaries. Things like the television show, for example. I'm not exactly saying that I'm thanking cancer for that, but in some regards, I guess I am.

Even though things are stable for now, you never know when that could change. And the same thing could be said for anyone. All it takes is a medical issue, car accident or earthquake to completely turn your life as you know it upside down. So, my advice for you? Don't wait to realize your dreams. Because you might not have the time to do it.