I clung desperately to the "promise" of a cure which Dr Whiteside had given to me weeks before. He said “We will cure you”. But I needed to know more. I sought answers to many questions, especially the one about the absence of long-living patients. Why couldn’t I talk to someone who had been through the treatment and could help me? So, on this day I paid a visit to the ground floor office of my social worker friend.
"Can I come in?"
She looked up from the papers on her desk.
"Sure Wayne. How have you been?"
"Oh, not too bad. Those drugs are pretty potent though." "Yeh, I can imagine," she said.
"Have you seen any of the others today?"
This wasn't getting me anywhere. I was not really in the mood for small talk.
"No, not really ... I ... I need to know more about the disease."
''I'm not sure how I can help."
She could understand my desire to know more but, like others, relied heavily on well-rehearsed answers. She wasn’t going to give definitive answers as she couldn’t. She knew what usually happened to patients like me.
My parents were waiting to take me home. I pressured her for information, and she gave me a rather large textbook which she thought adequately covered the subject. Neither of us knew that it was probably five to seven years out of date.
I looked forward to reading it.
"I'm not sure that I should be giving you this book. Things are changing so quickly."
"I don't know that you should be reading this."
Her doubts were mounting. She was unsure of exactly what I'd been told, and what her role should be.
"I'll be O.K.," I said with a forced smile. "I just want to look up a few things."
She seemed relatively happy, so I hurried from the room.
I sat in the back seat of the family car, and drew back the hard cover.
The enclosed material was both clinical and graphic in its presentation. Staring at me were the disfigured faces and limbs of leukaemia patients, and within the print were some basic facts. I was particularly taken aback by the red spots which grew to become enormous blotches. Some types were worse than others, but the general pattern was fairly consistent. A variety of programs of chemotherapy and radiotherapy could be employed, but within two/three years all patients would suffer relapses, and would be dead within five years.
DEAD WITHIN FIVE YEARS.

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