Does Time Really Run Out

Kandy Moreau

DOES TIME REALLY RUN OUT

If an October 2024 medical chart notes a six-year life expectancy, should one

accept that estimate as a conclusion?

Predictions may be useful to doctors, but they are still guestimates applied to a

persons whose lives may have never followed ordinary paths. Guestimates shall not apply.

In my case, going back about twenty years ago, what began as an uneventful

physical with my primary care physician became the first step in a long medical education I

never asked for.

At that visit, his primary concern was my weight, which did not surprise me, and was

the number one reason I postponed regular doctor visits. Any ailment I mentioned

somehow found its way back to that subject. I understand the health consequences of

weight, and I know how mine has affected me. However, I believed then and somewhat

believe now, that nobody ever died of a fat ass alone. Contributing factors of some sort

would surely have been present. I have also always believed that my body deserved a

closer look than a single explanation.

That closer look began after the visit, when my blood work raised a new concern.

In about a week, his nurse called to say he had referred me to a specialist

because my blood work showed elevated platelets—around 600, when 400 is considered

normal. It was not alarming, but it was worth looking into.

A few days later, I received a call from the Maine Center for Cancer.

I asked the caller to repeat herself because I felt like I was about to pass out.

She apologized and clarified that she was calling from the Maine Center for Cancer AND

Blood Disorders, and that the concern was my blood. Three days later, I met with a

hematologist, who put me on an oral chemotherapy medication to keep my platelets from

climbing. For the next several years, she monitored me as my platelets rose and fell like a

roller coaster. The diagnosis was thrombocytosis: not extraordinary, but something that

had to be managed. Time, it seemed, was aplenty.

I researched platelets—high counts, low counts, and everything I

could find. But because I had no other symptoms, felt well, and was young and fearless, I

did not dig deeply enough or ask enough questions to push my doctor toward further

action. Looking back, we were both too complacent.

After she left the practice, my new doctor ordered a bone marrow aspiration,

something that, truthfully, should have been done years earlier. The result: just like that, I

had myelodysplastic syndrome, or MDS—a group of rare blood cancers

in which bone marrow stem cells fail to mature, causing shortages of healthy blood cells.

Contributing factors can include age, exposure to certain chemicals—which did not apply

to me—or prior chemotherapy treatment, which did.

There are several types of MDS, but the specific category matters less here than

what the diagnosis forced me to confront. There WOULD be a “time limit” attached to my

future, but that limit would depend on several factors that neither the doctors nor I could

possibly predict. It will be a wait and see situation, which is so easy to say, but so hard to

manage.

When I search for answers, I research everything—sometimes to an absurd degree.

In my search for “Why me?” I began building a list of possibilities, even though the damage

has been done and nothing can change, but you never know. Answers to mysteries are

discovered every day!

A bone marrow aspiration can disclose diagnostic findings, including genetic

abnormalities. Mutations, in other words—information we may not always want but

sometimes cannot avoid.

My search for medical answers also connected to a lifelong search for identity.

I have been trying to understand who I am since I was old enough to know I was adopted

and what that meant. Over time, I uncovered a painful and complicated biological story.

Based on what I found, it appears likely that my biological parents were closely related.

Too close. That possibility raised difficult questions about genetics, inheritance, and what

may have been present in my body from the beginning.

To be clear, I am not claiming certainty; I am trying to make sense of patterns that

seem impossible to ignore. I do have genetic mutations, and it is hard for me not to wonder

whether my biological origins played a role.

Proving that would require years of research, money, and a level of institutional

interest that people like me rarely receive.

But in my mind, before my body even entered the world, it was already fighting.

Then life added trauma almost immediately.

I was born in December; a cold month in the Northeast, and according to the story I

later learned, my biological mother left me outside in a cold trash bin, near the back of the

hospital while she hitchhiked a ride to Portland. I was found, and she was

institutionalized, but damage had been done. Psychological damage for sure once I

became aware of the story, though I have always wondered just how much I took in as in

infant.

Less than a year later, I was adopted.

By the time I was two, my adoptive father was abusing me, and my adoptive mother

failed to protect me. That became the landscape of my childhood.

When my adoptive parents divorced in my early teens, freedom felt almost

unbelievable.

Eventually, I could sleep without waking at every creak of the floor.

Within a year, while babysitting for a neighbor, I was assaulted again.

That is the larger context behind my resistance to simple predictions.

I started life with complications, and they kept building.

The physical issues appeared much later, but I believe the trauma contributed to my

body in ways I may never be able to prove. Had none of the trauma happened, would the

chromosomal issues have mattered? No one can know, and that is the point.

A diagnosis may describe a disease, but it cannot fully measure the life that carries

it. I believe my history—genetic, medical, and traumatic—has shaped how I arrived here.

That does not make me predictable. It makes me complicated, and complexity does not fit

neatly into a life-expectancy note.