Dear Fred Hutch Donor,

My name is Johan Malkoski and in 2015 I was 48 years old. In September of that year I was mountain biking with my oldest son and had an accident that put me in the hospital with what I thought was only broken ribs and a broken shoulder. An emergency room visit confirmed my self assessment and informed me I also had a blood cancer called Myleofibrosis.

There were two ways this diagnosis could go…it could progress and manifest into Acute Myeloid Leukemia and in a couple years I’d probably be dead. Or we could tackle it head on, find a stem cell donor and do a bone marrow transplant which could cure the disease. There was a 30% risk that I wouldn’t make it thru the procedure but I liked the 70% odds of making it so we searched for a donor that would be a genetic match for myself. Luckily a 20 year old German man selflessly donated his stem cells and in September 2016 I went thru 6 days of high dosage chemotherapy that essentially killed me and then a day later had the stem cell transplant.

Before my transplant I spent 8 days in the hospital because they had to remove a massive 12 pound spleen from me so my transplant would take. After a month of recovery I went back into the hospital where I went thru 6 days of two different chemotherapy’s that essentially killed me before i had the bone marrow transplant that would save my life and cure my cancer. 29 challenging days later I was released and then spent the next three months going back and forth to the hospital every day but 4 until I was out of the 100 day danger zone. Durning those 100 days, I doctors did 4 bone marrow samplings from my hips. Gave me 4 doses of Methotrexate which destroyed my mouth to butt. Because of what the chemo did to me I had to have 17 red blood transfusions and 37 platelet transfusions. The spleen removal gave me a blood clot that required me to self administer 225 needles of blood thinner to the stomach. And because my immune system was essentially brand new, I had 93 days of fluid infusions to keep me from getting sick, along with copious amounts Oxy, Morphine, Fentanyl, Benadryl and numerous other drugs that I can’t remember because of the previous drugs mentioned to help me get thru everything that I had to go thru.

In talking to my doctors after the treatment about how complicated a transplant was, they put it in simple terms that were easy for me to understand. A heart transplant was like changing a carburetor on a car engine but doing a stem cell transplant was like changing an engine, transmission and wiring harness. Blood is its own organ and with a stem cell transplant they were changing my immune system to my donors, as well as my blood type.

After the 100 days of danger, I returned to work two days a week in the office, and the worked from home the other three. In February I self prescribed myself back to my normal activity in the winter which is snowboarding with my kids. My “new me” was different, as it should be after what I went thru but the fact was, life was moving along as it should be.

During the 100 days of danger I met so many nurses, PA’s, Doctors and Researchers committed to the cause of making something as miserable as cancer go away, or less miserable. I learned that what I had just gone thru was 10 times easier than what someone in my situation had gone thru 5 years before me.

Four years later, I look back on what Doctors told my wife and I what would be the most challenging time in my life as a pleasant, eye opening experience that (I can’t believe Im saying this but) I have fond memories of. And it’s because these people are provided with the tools they need to make everything work the way its supposed too.

You, Fred Hutch Donor are the one that gave these people those tools. Thank you, thank you for paying it forward by donating or by paying it back because you’ve gone thru the cancer system. Thank you for letting me to continue on discovering the new me and having a blast doing it.