Wednesday, April 25, 2018

A Conversation With My Bone Marrow on Her 15th Birthday

Yesterday marked my fifteenth straight year without cancer. I think about that. I even conversed with my bone marrow about it. And of course I wrote about it.

As published on GatherDC

My 15-year-old “daughter” says that since I was born in the period when the sun passed through the constellation Capricornus, I’m—according to her favorite lifestyle magazine Elle—charming, graceful, and a freak in the sheets, lady in the streets. My daughter says this as we sit at our pollen-covered bistro set on the covered balcony of our ninth-floor apartment overlooking Crystal and Pentagon Cities. Clouds have rolled in and it has begun raining.

“I’m so glad I got that messy self-exploration out of the way!” I tell my daughter. “Now that I know myself fully, I can begin honing my sheets-and-streets skills.”

It’s cool being able to talk like this with my daughter. Though, that’s because I didn’t conceive her. She’s the stem cells collected from an anonymous baby girl’s umbilical cord. The cells were transplanted into me on April 24, 2003, to treat my second cancer called myelodysplasia. Those stem cells repopulated inside my bone marrow, and now my blood is her XX blood. My immune system is partially hers. I am partially her. Keep reading A Conversation With My Bone Marrow on Her 15th Birthday

Benjamin Rubenstein holding his umbilical cord stem cells in April 2003 before his bone marrow transplant


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