A cheerful post about blood cancer

September is blood cancer awareness month. With upper-case if you want. I don’t. It’s just a disease. “A petty, ugly illness that we won’t dignify by speaking of it,” as Dr. Cox would say.
The reason I still want to speak of it is that I have a precursor to blood cancer. Or leukemia, which is the same thing. So far it isn’t anything to worry about. For me, that is. Only one in a hundred who have my condition, monoclonal b-cell leukocytosis, end up with leukemia. And I have a very mild form of MBL.
Still I do. Worry. Of course. Why wouldn’t I? Just like other healthy people, I have managed to ignore the thought of my own death. Now I realize that it is going to happen. And I feel it. I feel little white bloods cells of death running through my veins now, that weren’t there before. Suddenly my body is not my temple anymore. Now there are things in it that don’t care if I die. Odds are I won’t die of leukemia, but it doesn’t matter. If I did have leukemia or some other cancer, I might be dead in a few months. And that makes me pause.
I think about why that would be a bad thing. In the big scheme of things it wouldn’t be. The sun would keep rising and people would go on brushing their teeth and fighting over parking spaces. But my boys would be so heartbroken if I died that just thinking about it almost breaks my heart.
In an evolutionary sense my work on the planet is almost done. (For anyone who wonders what the meaning of life is, it is to have babies. Everytying else is pointless.) What my genes are programmed for is crossing over to the next generation. I have done that part, producing offspring. Maybe that’s why dying doesn’t scare me as much as before. But for my genes to make me really stop caring, I have to survive long enough to raise my boys to sexual maturity. So they can produce offspring.
So after my boys have kids of their own, the invisible leukemian assholes in my blood can multiply all they want. If they do, they will eventually crowd out the good guys and make it impossible for me to clot blood, fight infections, transport oxygen and, finally, live.
I would miss it, though, life. Baseball. Deacon Blue. The mountains. Pretty girls. And my boys. Most of all I would miss my boys.