A Soft Landing: How one Woman Survivied a Collision Course with Death

By Stacey Blake

As a Soft Landing opens, Stacey Blake tries to process her instant life-changing diagnosis of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). She is immediately immersed into a world of serious medical procedures, including a bone marrow biopsy and preparation for a stem cell transplant. She looks for signs of reassurance from the Almighty. Stacey alternates ac

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lightwalk Publishing
• Release date: Jan 9, 2014
• ISBN: 9781942692058

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

How It Began

TOM, I AM NOT FEELING VERY WELL, I SAID, CALLING HOME to my husband from my San Francisco Bay Area hotel room. I think I would like to head out into the country for a weekend at a B&B to try to get some rest. I’ve been really tired this week, and I am coughing a lot. I don’t feel ready to fly back to the East Coast just yet. I think I need a brief rest.

Tom said, Sure, honey, are you sick?

I don’t know? I don’t think so … maybe just overtired. All this week I’ve been coughing. During my meeting at Safeway and all throughout lunch with the buyer, I had a persistent dry cough. Not a cold, but a cough. And between appointments, I needed to head back to my hotel room, to nap and recover some energy. I’m just really tired.

And so began the beginning of the end of my life as I had known it. Unbeknownst to me at that time, my life in a matter of days would change. It was June 2009, and during my weekend in the country, I could not walk two blocks without having to sit for long periods of rest. My sleep, while long, was not refreshing, and in general, I simply did not feel well. I could not say with any positive sense what was wrong. I though was not right. I was not feeling like myself.

As I drove to the airport to head home a few days later, I can recall the extreme feeling of being off balance with the car, while taking a long, wide exit ramp. I had a dizziness that felt like much more than typical vertigo, and I had to hold on tight, tight to the wheel, and focus, for fear that I would pass out and lose control of the car.

Once home, on that Tuesday, I called my mom and told her what I had been experiencing. Listening to me cough lightly all through the call, my mom asked me repeatedly to call my doctor for an appointment. I kept saying to her that all I needed was another day of solid rest. Mom persisted and repeated my need to call. Reluctantly, I agreed. Mom being Mom, before hanging up, asked that I do it the minute I hung up with her.

As I dialed my primary doctor’s telephone number, at the Lahey Clinic in Burlington, Massachusetts, I almost stopped, thinking that really all I did need was another good day of quiet rest. The phone, however, was quickly answered and the nurse I was talking with said immediately, Stacey, you need to come in to see us this week.

I told her, I can’t do that; I leave Thursday for Philadelphia.

You are not going to Philadelphia on Thursday, she said. You will be coming here tomorrow.

But I have a presentation!

She said, We will need to see you first, and then see.

Within minutes my appointment for the next day was scheduled. I hung up thinking, Wow; this is kind of a bit much, this whole thing. Needing to go to the doctor’s on such short notice, it felt to me almost like an over-reaction. Little did I know how wrong I had been …

The next day began with a series of chest x-rays, blood work, breathing tests, and a visit to my primary physician. While traveling from one test to the other, I was exhausted. Several times I was so slow in my walking I thought I would just stop in the middle of the clinic’s hallway. I could not understand what was wrong with me. It was as if air was being let out a balloon. I was fading by the minute. Finally, while I sat in the waiting room, the minutes ticked by. My appointment, which was to be at 11:00 am, was delayed. Ten minutes, twenty minutes, then thirty minutes passed until a young nurse came out and said more time would be needed, and to not leave or go anywhere, but to wait. I nodded