An interview in the New York Times reminds me of a great blessing from God our family received a little over six years ago.
I have written about this before, but I just want to again give praise to the Lord for the gifts he gives to men.
Six and a half years ago, my wife began to lose weight rapidly and was bruising easily. She was becoming more and more exhausted each day. (She was enjoying the weight loss part!) We called our doctor who immediately got the ball rolling in our health care system, no small feat. The diagnosis was Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia (CML). Our hematologist was very upbeat, however. The new therapy for this disease was a drug called Gleevec, just approved for CML treatment two years previously. We haven’t looked back. Gleevec has very minimal side-effects (we haven’t really noticed any). My wife is living a normal life.
The interview with Bryan Druker, the doctor in charge of developing Gleevec reminded me of how close my dear wife was to death’s door:
The problem [with a CML diagnosis] was that the death rate in the first year was 25 to 50 percent.
The life expectancy after diagnosis before Gleevec was about 5 years. And the previous treatments would make those years pretty miserable.
This interview gives you a bit of insight into the persistence and dedication of Dr. Druker in bringing Gleevec into production. It is now approved for ten different forms of cancer, but is most successful with CML, I believe.
My wife takes a couple of little orange pills every morning and God has given her six and a half years of normal life. If there is a drawback, as I was commenting to a friend, is that she would have been in heaven these last five years or so … instead, she gets to live with me.
Maybe there is a purgatory?
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