Chronic Myeloid Leukemia: Jacoby’s Story

A random collapse during his last semester of college changed Jacoby Sherrell’s life. “After I fell at work, I went a week or two later at a nearby clinic near the school,” Jacoby said. “And that's when they told me that they had a theory that I had a form of cancer, but they didn't know what.”

Jacoby was recommended to drive to Indianapolis from Terre Haute to see a blood and marrow cancer specialist at Indiana Blood & Marrow Transplant at Franciscan Health Indianapolis. There, he learned he had a type of leukemia called chronic myeloid leukemia.

What Is Chronic Myeloid Leukemia?

Chronic myeloid leukemia, also known as chronic myelogenous leukemia, is a type of leukemia that starts in certain blood-forming cells of the bone marrow. This type of cancer occurs mostly in adults, but chronic myeloid leukemia rarely it occurs in children.

An estimated 9,110 new cases of chronic myeloid leukemia will be diagnosed in the United States in 2021, according to American Cancer Society estimates.

What Are Symptoms Of Chronic Myeloid Leukemia?

Symptoms of chronic myeloid leukemia can include:

• Weakness
• Fatigue
• Night sweats
• Weight loss
• Fever
• Bone pain
• An enlarged spleen
• Pain or a sense of "fullness" in the belly
• Feeling full after eating even a small amount of food

How Is Chronic Myeloid Leukemia Treated?

Targeted therapy drugs that attack proteins in the cells are the main treatment for chronic myeloid leukemia, but some patients might also need other treatments, including chemotherapy, radiation therapy, surgery or stem cell transplants.

“Eventually they got me to the point to where, I think it was the end of 2018, they were saying, ‘So you have a choice. Do you want to stay on medication for the rest of your life? Or do you want to go into the process of looking into stem cell treatment?’" Jacoby said. “That's when they find out for sure that the leukemia had progressed to the point to where certain oral treatments that I was on at the time wasn't necessarily working. So that's when we went a little bit more in depth about actually doing the stem cell.”

Allogeneic stem cell treatments, which take stem cells from matched donors, are the main type of transplant used to treat chronic myeloid leukemia.

“I was in the hospital from the first or second week of April until the first week of June,” Jacoby said.

A nurse provided Jacoby with the encouragement through the process.

“Before I went through the process, she was like, ‘I'm going to tell you that this is going to be the hardest thing that you've ever going to have to do. But no matter how prepared we are or how much we say is going to be okay, at the end of the day, if your spirit is not right, and you're not saying you can do it, you don't have that mentally, you will not make it through this process,’” he said. “’So just know you're going to have a support system, but at the same time, you have to know it that you'll be able to make it as well.’"