Everyone has at least one good story. What's yours?

My autoimmune disorder was progressing and the treatments were becoming less effective. The only remaining measure was a bone marrow transplant (which is a very extreme measure, ie.: chemo, radiation, and all the fun stuff that goes with it)

The thing is, it was the kind of condition that didn't really affect me a whole lot. There wasn't really any pain or major inconveniences in life and just a monthly-or-so treatment regimen. It only spiked once every few years (putting me in the hospital for longer), it wasn't all that bad. So, it was difficult to make a decision, given that I wasn't really having any perceptible symptoms, only what my specialists were telling me based on test results.

I hemmed and hawed for a few weeks, when I suddenly started getting sicker. Although, two hospital visits in a month wasn't that unusual for me; it'd happened before, I just assumed it was more of the same.

Nearing the end of the second visit, my GP came in and sat down. There wasn't much lead up: they found blast cells in my bloodstream. For the uninitiated: blast cells are one of building blocks for your various types of blood cells, they don't belong in your veins. They're supposed to stay in your marrow, but start releasing into your veins when they reproduce uncontrollably ... as in cancer. Specifically, in my case, leukemia.

What I later found out was that there were pre-indicators of then-unidentified cancerous cell growth months prior to my doctors' advice to start thinking seriously about transplant. If, instead of delaying, I had made the decision to undergo transplant when I was advised to consider it, the cancer would likely have gone undetected until it was too late and the procedure would have failed.

tl;dr procrastination saved my life.

Fun fact: I'm now a chimera. The DNA of my marrow and blood is distinct from my organs. Totally not going out to commit some crimes now.

/r/AskReddit Thread