Join the fight to conquer leukemia

When I first encountered Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, he was Lew Alcindor. That was in March of 1967, when UCLA’s basketball team arrived in Freedom Hall for the NCAA Final Four. There’s no way I could have guessed that, more than four decades later, he and I would become blood brothers. But, in a sense, that’s now what we are. We both have leukemia.We’re an odd couple, Jabbar and I. He’s the 7-foot-1 ex-basketball player who led UCLA to three straight NCAA basketball titles before going on to become the leading scorer in pro basketball history, and I’m one of the many scribes who tried, mostly in vain, to adequately describe his elegant presence on the court.

He grew up in New York City, me in Kentucky. He’s African-American, I’m white. He likes jazz, I prefer oldies rock n’ roll. It just goes to prove, I suppose, that leukemia is an equal-opportunity disease.

From what I’ve read, Jabbar was shaken when he was told that he had Chronic Myeloid Leukemia (CML). “I was scared,” he said. “I thought it could mean I have a month to live.” I know the feeling. That’s exactly how I felt 3 ½ years ago when I was told that I had developed Chronic Lymphocytic Leukemia (CLL).

Our diseases are different because of the types of white blood cells that are spreading. But they’re alike in that both are incurable and fatal, both generally strike people past the age of 55 (I’m 66, Jabbar 62), and both spread slowly. We both are far luckier than former Syracuse football star Ernie Davis, who became the first African-American to win the Heisman Trophy in 1961. He was diagnosed with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) in the summer of 1962 and died nine months later.

Both Jabbar and I have been told that, with proper monitoring and medication, we can reasonably expect to live out our days without making significant lifestyle changes. Nevertheless, our forms of cancer are not to be taken lightly. Ed Bradley, the pioneer African-American reporter for CBS News, died from CLL when he was 65.

All told, an estimated 35,000 Americans are diagnosed with one form of leukemia or another every year – and 22,000 eventually die of it. Researchers have tried to pinpoint a cause of leukemia, but so far have succeeded only in linking it to high doses of radiation and the chemical benzene. Treatments may include chemotherapy, radiation, and use of drugs to promote the body’s immune reaction to cancerous cells.