Aaron Offord- My Journey with Leukemia and the Lessons it taught
Thursday, February 10, 2011
By: Aaron Offord

In February 2010, I was diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. I immediately underwent chemotherapy to get the disease into remission. On December 22, 2010 I was blessed with an unrelated donor's stem cells. I am now recovering from my bmt.

I first wanted to take some a moment to give a little background about me. My name is Aaron Offord, I am a twenty-eight year old male who lives Port Credit, Ontario with the love of my life, Amy and our little kitten Dora. I have a wonderfully supportive family and group of friends.
This past year has been quite the adventure with many ups and downs. On February 8th, 2010, I was officially diagnosed with B-Cell Philadelphia Positive Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia. The hi-lights of my past year include:
- Successfully completing Induction therapy and achieving remission
- Completing a Central Nervous System Intensification Cycle
- Completing 10 Intensification/Consolidation cyles
- Completing 2 rounds of Maintenance Chemotherapy
- Asking Amy to Marry me and her actually saying yes
- Successfully completing the in hospital portion of an Unrelated Allogenic Bone Marrow Transplant
- Now recovering at home
I created a blog (www.aaronoutward.com) very early on in my journey while still going through induction therapy. When I created this blog I always knew it's the focus of its content would eventually shift. That is actually why I named it Aaron Outward instead of Aaron Offord's Blog.
In the beginning my blogging topics were predominantly focused on my journey to recovery. This blog provided the perfect way to provide updates in one central location to everyone. By doing this, I greatly reduced the amount of emails and phonecalls I had to make telling the same story.
As my journey continued and my treatments progressed, I realized I was changing. I had begun looking at myself much more introspectively. This self reflection gave me the realization that that my journey with Acute Leukemia was providing me with so many invaluable lessons about both, myself and life. In addition to this, my progress updates were not required as frequently because each cycle was an exact repeat of the cycle before.
This is when I realized the time had come to begin the shift in the direction of the blog to becoming more outwardly focused. Going through Cancer teaches us so many things, and most of us don't get the opportunity to learn these lessons until we are personally faced with a life altering event. But why should that be the case? Why should only cancer survivors be privy to these lessons?
Which brings us to today. I have shifted the main focus of the blog to speak about the wonderful things cancer teaches us about personal growth and self development.