druker. all i care about is you are making some progress, druker told his patient who had come to portland, oregon for a bone marrow biopsy. the procedure would reveal whether the medicine, a bill he had been taking daily for six months was tackling the leukemias that had invaded his body. eichner had chronic myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells that the slow-growing could be fatal. i will be happy if you are 18 out of 20. eichner nodded his understanding his jittery foot the only sign of his nervousness. for eichner those numbers were part of the new language he had learned since his diagnosis in summer of 2011. as with so many cancer diagnoses the education began unexpectedly. after a day or so of sharp excruciating kidney bean, eichner, single-parent of a teenage boy, drove himself to the emergency room at his local hospital in olympia, washington, where he had been living. his sister-in-law, a trauma flight nurse told him she thought he had kidney stones. so he was expected

druker. ok. so i will begin with the excerpt from the prelude, which is entitled, down to the bone, february 2012. gary eikener sat in a chair backed up against a wall. across the room, his nurse was half hidden by a computer. she scrolled through his medical chart on monitor he couldn't see, typing his responses to her questions. he answered and smiled as if he were just fine as though that would somehow make it so. he kept his worry concealed, silently wondering what the next hour would reveal about the disease that had so suddenly overtaken his life. it permeated his thoughts. the nurse ran through the litany of side effects he might be experience from the leukemia medication he had recently begun to take. any chest pains she asked, heart problems? swelling in your ankles? his no was tempered only by his description of what happened when he took the drug on an empty stomach. it's massive cramping in the stomach. it's just like the worse thing you ever had. the nurse knew nothing of the worst t