Appreciating, and Missing, My Blood Cancer Sister

I used to say that my blood-cancer-sister Patricia Jempty, who called herself PJ, was my doppelganger, or double. I think that’s what she called me many moons ago when she reached out to me after she read some of my writing about blood cancer. A doppleganger is “someone who looks like someone else,” according to The Brittanica Dictionary and others. It is secondarily “a ghost that looks like a living person.”

Something in common: our AML

We didn’t look alike. And she definitely wasn’t a ghost. But we were mirror images beneath our skin, inside our bodies where the same blood cancer had upended our lives. We both had AML, or acute myeloid leukemia. It is a relatively rare cancer, accounting for one percent of cancers.

We were lucky. We could speak in shorthand. We were roughly the same age; both born in 1954, eight months apart. We were both runners. Both had three children. We were Jewish and from New York. Both writers. We both loved our dogs. We liked good strong coffee.

We had similar blood cancer journeys

We even were treated at the same cancer hospital – the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute – and we had both been cared for by the same group of doctors, though our individual docs were different. We both had endured chemotherapy followed by transplants. We both relapsed after nearly five years. She had a second transplant. I had three more.

We were both klutzes. We had a friendly competition on our blogs about whose fall or other mishap was the most spectacular. We cracked jokes about the nasty aftereffects. We improvised when necessary. She did that especially well when she tripped on a curb and fell while running the New York City marathon through the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society’s Team in Training. She picked herself up, had brunch at a friend’s apartment, then went out and ran some more. She didn’t finish, but she was a winner anyway.

When we met in real life and she opened the door to her New York apartment, I felt even more strongly like I had known her forever. We talked about introducing our dogs to each other if I could find the energy to drive four or five hours to the upstate New York country house that she loved. It wasn’t in the cards, but we still had fun talking about it.

Side effects got in the way of staying in touch

At first, I hardly noticed when our paths diverged. I had constant challenges but managed to get back on my feet. She wasn’t getting up so easily anymore. Her blog posts seemed to have a cloud over them. She didn’t sugarcoat her discouragement.

She fell down the subway stairs in New York and fell in the middle of the night in their country house while a pot burned on the stove. “It was as bad as it gets,” she wrote.

She got a cane. She got a walker.

“Beating leukemia to the ground is one thing; surviving the nasty side effects that linger for many years, possibly forever, can be daunting,” she wrote. “I've cataloged my own complaints: destroyed tear glands, three tooth extractions, melanoma surgery on cheek and ankle, leukemia cutis, neuropathy, weakness, loss of most muscle, extreme GVH of the skin and a touch in the liver; psychological issues. Forgive me if I've left anything out.”
https://pj-plog.blogspot.com/2014/04/surviving-leukemia.html

“Wow, what a story. Glad it worked out, though,” I wrote on April 27, 2014.

Missing my pal

It wasn’t working out, though. The complications snowballed. It seemed like one minute she was cracking a joke and the next she was in hospice in Brooklyn. I texted with Ann, one of our blood cancer friends. I said I had thought of going down there but decided it was her time with family. Her husband, Marty, called almost exactly two months later to say that she had passed away, peacefully, in her sleep.

I was sitting in my usual spot at the kitchen table. My middle son was living at home at the time. He was in his usual spot in the den. I went and stood in the doorway. I hardly knew what to say (a rarity for me). “She was my doppleganger,” I said. I don’t remember exactly what Joe said. It was a reality check.

No, we were NOT really doubles. But a death like this, of someone so similar, made me feel my mortality more. This could happen to me. This didn’t happen to me (queue survivor’s guilt). I would miss my pal.

In the ten years that have passed, I have thought of her often. I wish I could tell her about the crazy things that have happened to me. She would appreciate the story of the subway door closing on me, of the woman who screamed and pushed me out. She would laugh about my fall UP a flight of stairs in the Paris metro, followed by a belly flop onto a train. I wanted to tell her when I tripped while running or when I fell off a bike. She would be impressed by my concussion like nobody else would. I got caught in some brambles on an ill-conceived woodland walk with the dog. I asked myself, “What would PJ do?” She would extricate herself, brush off the dirt, and keep going for as long as she could. And she would even manage to laugh about it.