My Story

I was senior assistant instructor at Jeff Bolt's school at that time, teaching and working out 2 to 3 times each week and in fairly good physical condition. Actually it is thanks to a young student with whom I had worked closely since he'd begun training at our school at the age of 13 that my condition was discovered. While practicing free fighting one day he managed to get me with a finger jab to my armpit, (a technique I taught him, ahem). That strike resulted in a swelling in my armpit which eventually led to my diagnosis. On September 19, 2000, I was diagnosed with Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia, a sub-set of AML (Acute Myelogenous Leukemia). I was immediately taken to UTMB in Galveston, Texas and subjected to a seemingly endless stream of doctors/nurses who either carried a fist full of vials for one blood test after another or a clip board to ask me yet the same series of questions over and over, UTMB being a teaching hospital. Some time very late that night or early the next morning, I was moved to a temporary room. Thanks to our families, our 4 kids were well taken care of allowing my wife, Robyn, to stay by my side for the entire four months I was in the hospital. I underwent 3 rounds of chemotherapy, each one lasting 7 days x 24hrs, and 4 bone marrow tests. On January 19, 2001 I was released from the hospital, then in April started a 2 year maintenance regimen which I completed in April of 2003. The good news is that I'm still here, if there IS any bad news it's that I lost a lot of my physical abilities. It was over a year after my diagnosis before I could go back to class for anything other than to visit. When I did go back for real, my brain new what to do, but my body just couldn't do it yet, so I spent several years trying to get back to where I was. In some respects I'm still working on it, in other ways I've actually surpassed where I was. The bottom line is that even though the young man whom I was teaching then can whip my butt now, it's all good. I'm just thankful and blessed to still be doing one of the things I love most, martial arts.