Part 1- Cancer Story
This is a story of how me an abnormal white blood cell and my friends took over the normal blood cells in my hosts body and infected a healthy human body with Leukemia (a cancer of the blood) that spreads all throughout the body uncontrollably. However this cancer does have a cure.
It all started when me and my friends were floating around in my hosts bone marrow this was stage 1, the bone marrow looked like a sponge-like tissue in the bones. Me and my friends didn’t know where we were going so we floated around for a while. As we were floating around in the bone marrow on our journey my abnormal white blood cell friends started to divide very slowly one by one. As me and my friends crowd out the normal blood cells my hosts blood couldn’t do its job anymore they started to feel some of the symptoms of bleeding and bruising easily and having a higher risk of getting infections.
Next me and my friends bumped into a reddish object protected by a rib like structure, we soon figured out it was the liver, this was stage 2. As we floated and explored inside the liver we started to divide more faster and spread throughout my hosts body. At this point a quarter of my hosts body was infected. As we advanced throughout my hosts body we took over parts like the lymph nodes and spleen. At this point my hosts body started feeling most of the symptoms of Leukemia like feeling very tired.
Now that we abnormal white blood cells have overcrowded the normal blood cells in my hosts body they were fully infected with the cancer Leukemia. They felt all the symptoms. At this point my hosts body was feeling very deteriorated and week. A few weeks later we cells felt waves of shock going through my hosts body they were going through chemotherapy or corticosteroids which is a reduction treatment of the cancer/tumour. This shocking of the body lasted for 4 whole weeks and was reducing the amount of my abnormal white blood cell friends. My host had a certain gene change called the Philadelphia Chromosome, so they had to be treated with tyrosine kinase inhibitor which is a drug that activated the proteins. Their were also many other treatments my host could have used such as consolidation and maintenance therapy.
Now my host was going through remission which is recovery now more normal blood cells were present in my hosts body. Leukemia is cancer that can be treated successfully and unsuccessfully. But my hosts went through recovery both mentally and physically because the cancer itself is very harsh and the chemotherapy makes you very weak because of the electric shock.
I used Citation Machine to site-
Sources- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leukemia http://www.webmd.com/cancer/tc/leukemia-what-happens http://www.cancer.ca/en/cancer-information/cancer-type/leukemia/leukemia/?region=bc
http://www.healthline.com/health/leukemia
Citations-
Peacock, Judith, and Barbara Asselin. Leukemia. Mankato, Mn.: LifeMatters, 2000. Print.
Leukemia. Atlanta, GA: American Cancer Society, 2011. Print.
Lerner, Adrienne Wilmoth. Leukemia. Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.
Lerner, Adrienne Wilmoth. Leukemia. Detroit: Gale Cengage Learning, 2009. Print.
and Leukemia book. And this video below.
Part 2- The Making Of The Cancer Story
There were many steps in creating this story I answered questions like what happened to me as a gene and what caused my mutation, how is my cancer treated and how did this effect my hosts body. In order to understand what it is like to have Leukemia I researched peoples personal experiences. For this project I used a variety of sources like websites, videos, photos and books. I researched facts like what happens to the cell, what happened to the host. I put a category for sources and I used a variety of sources for one fact to check if it was a true fact I also looked at people who had Leukemia tell what it is like to have it on a website. Overall this project was a challenge because it was hard to understand what it feels like to have Leukemia and how it effects the human mentally and physically.