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Ten years ago, college instructor Keith Ballew cancelled two classes and got into his car to drive home. Something wasn’t quite right.
“I just felt weak,” he said. So weak, in fact, that he figured he had low blood sugar. “I’m diabetic and thought I had taken too much insulin, but I didn’t have the blurred vision and blind spots I normally get with low blood sugar.”
With a family history of heart problems, he decided it would be prudent to check in at a hospital. There, doctors told Ballew that he had premyloid leukemia, also known as myloid dysplasia. “That basically means that my red blood cells were immature…not fully formed…and weren’t carrying iron around my system,” he explained.
After beginning the fall semester – his 16th – at Kilgore Community College in Texas, he had to take sick leave and then retired four months later in Feb. 1995. To escape the heat and humidity of his native state, Ballew ventured north to Vancouver, Washington, where his wife’s son and daughter lived.
“The only reason
I am alive today is that
somebody, somewhere at some time gave blood.
That has kept me alive.”
The Northwest environment agreed with him and within a year he and his wife returned for good. One reason was the medical care.
Ballew’s condition necessitated regular blood transfusions and while visiting Vancouver that first summer, he went to Southwest Washington Medical Center, where Marcus Braun, M.D., treated the Texan. “I made a deal with him right there,” said Ballew, “that he would take care of me. I went back to Texas, sold my house and moved here.”
When Dr. Braun opened Northwest Cancer Specialists, Ballew followed. “I owe him a lot,” he said of the hematologist-oncologist.
Ballew still receives his regular blood transfusions at Southwest Washington Medical Center, which is supplied by Puget Sound Blood Center. He received additional transfusions during his December 2000 heart valve surgery.
“After 300 blood transfusions, I’ve never had a negative reaction,” he notes. “I can’t say enough about the Blood Center.”
After his initial diagnosis in 1994, doctors gave him a life expectancy of five years. Now 68, Ballew says with a smile, “ Here I am 10 years later. The only thing I can attribute it to is the availability of blood.”
While the transfusions are not a cure, they have allowed him to keep going.
“I don’t know what I would do if I showed up one day and there was no blood available. It would be all over with, because that is what is keeping me alive.”
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