The diagnosis seemed to come out of the blue: I’d been a very healthy person my entire life. An hour after a bone marrow test showed that I had leukemia, I was in an ambulance bound for Brigham and Women’s, where I had more tests and, in a few days, a diagnosis of AML. My entry to the Exeter (N.H.) Hospital emergency department was the start of a two-month period in which I never left a hospital. The doctor ordered a chest X-ray and blood tests. I was on a field trip in Boston with students from the middle school where I’m a nurse when I received an e-mail to call my physician. The first shock came in March 2012, when I e-mailed my doctor about some problems I’d been having for a couple of days – pain between my shoulder blades and difficulty swallowing. The Marathon bombing was the second shock in what had been a trying year and a half for all of us – myself, my family, our friends and neighbors – one that would test us in ways we’d never expected, but would ultimately bring us closer. When we met up near the medical tent, we were all in tears.Ī Trying Year Martha Laperle with her son, Ryan For several terrifying minutes, we didn’t know whether Ryan had been hurt, but we soon received a text from him. Ryan’s girlfriend, a friend and I had just walked past the location where one of the two bombs went off. Ryan was running to raise funds for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society and had received nearly $11,000 in pledges.īarely a minute after Ryan crossed the finish line, the area shook with explosions.
Just over a year earlier, at the age of 57, I had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of acute myeloid leukemia (AML), a diagnosis that turned my life upside down and led to weeks of chemotherapy and a stem cell transplant at Dana-Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center (DF/BWCC). Not only had he completed his first-ever marathon in four hours, but he was running, in large part, because of me. When my son Ryan ran the Boston Marathon this year, I watched him with a special level of pride.
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