103: Scenes from A Transplant
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Before he got sick, he pictured the world this way. There were the people who were healthy, like him, and the people who were sick, other people. And, unconsciously, as we all do, he drew a line between the two groups, the two countries. Then, when Paul Cowan was diagnosed with leukemia in 1987, he was struck with the fact that these are not, of course, two different populations, the sick and the healthy. Instead, he wrote, "The world is composed of the sick and they're not yet sick." He published an account of his illness in the village voice. I want to describe some of what I've seen during the voyage I've made. The journey from being a person who took his health for granted, to one who's trying to survive a life-threatening illness, I want to chart some of this wilderness for others who'll be here one day. Well, that's the mission of today's radio program. Because all of us, you and me both, if we're lucky, if we don't die when we're young, this is where we're heading. Heart disease, cancer. Men have a one in two lifetime chance of getting cancer. For women, it's one in three. If you're a man hearing the sound of my voice right now, I want you to look at yourself for a moment. It's you or me, man. Odds are one of us will get it. Or we'll both get it. Two other guys will go off scot-free. [Music] So let us chart this terrain where, if we all live long enough, we will be entering. Kellen writes, "During the past five months, I've learned that there's a land of the sick. When you receive a passport, an unwelcome diagnosis, you learn that the land has its own language, medical terminology, its own geography, hospitals, outpatient clinics, blood testing labs, doctors' offices, its own citizens, other sick people, its own pantheon of heroes and authority figures, doctors, medical researchers, hospital administrators, its own calendar dictated by the changes in one's body or by the results of medical tests. When you will, it's hard to remember what it's like to be sick. And after just a brief time in the hospital, Kellen found it hard to remember what it was like for him just weeks before to be active and self-sufficient. His picture of himself changed. He struggled to retain ties to the land of the healthy, to see himself as an exile who would return one day. But he did not return. Well, from WBEZ Chicago and Public Radio International, it's "This American Life, I'm Ira Glass." Most weeks, of course, we bring you a variety of different stories on some theme. Today, we bring you just one story about one person's journey from the world of healthy people into the world of sick ones. Today on our program seems from a transplant. In 1995, Rebecca Pearl had a new baby boy that she and her partner, Tom, named Griffin. She was a health science reporter with National Public Radio in Washington, D.C., where she just won a Peabody Award for an investigative series about the tobacco industry. She did a lot of stories about doctors and medicine. Then she was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin's lymphoma and entered the medical world as a patient. She had six months of radiation and chemotherapy. Didn't work. So, in the winter of 1996, as a last attempt to save her life, she and Tom traveled from their home in Maryland to Omaha, Nebraska, to the University of Nebraska Medical Center for a bone marrow transplant and another round of chemotherapy. A round of chemotherapy as much as 10 times stronger than the original. Dan Collison, a friend of theirs and a radio producer, went with them and he documented what happened. He also interviewed Rebecca a year later. This is her story. Daddy and Dan and I are going away, Griffey, for a little. We're going on a trip. You're going to stay with grandpa and grandma. Pop, pop, and grandma, okay? Sometimes I worry that Griffin's going to fall in love with some woman who just lays in bed all the time because that's what he sees his mother doing in the first two years of his life. I mean, he's going to fall in love with some woman who lies in bed and needs bond bonds
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