WINNING THE FUTURISTIC FIGHT AGAINST CANCER
IAN BRIDGES was stick welding a quarter-inch steel plate at Green River College in Auburn, Washington, when a sneeze sparked a nagging, achy pain in his back. Just like any normal person would, he thought he had pulled a muscle or something. But by this point, very little about Bridges’s medical history was normal.
For the next two days, he applied ice and heat. “It kept getting worse, to the point that when I sat down in my chair, whenever I sneezed, it felt like someone was driving a knife into my vertebrae,” he says. On February 14, 2019, Bridges got a blood test that confirmed his suspicions. For the third time in his life, he was diagnosed with the same cancer: The acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) had returned.
Having been through treatment twice before, Bridges knew that each time he was diagnosed with ALL, his chances of achieving remission decreased. At that moment, he had only one thought. “Please pardon my French, but I’m thinking, Fuck me.”
Still, it had been more than a decade since he had become one of the nearly 16,000 children in the U. S.
