Aplastic Anemia

by brendan on 05/17/2010

I was diagnosed with Severe Aplastic Anemia in July 2005, when I was 25 years old. It is a rare condition where your bone marrow does not properly produce blood cells. In my case the bone marrow was prevented from forming cells by an over-eager immune system; why that occurred is still unknown. However, thanks to the care of my doctors, and support from my family and friends, I am doing much better now.

When I was first told that I had Aplastic Anemia, I immediately Googled it to see what that was. One thing I learned was that not many other people have it, so survivor blogs and support groups can be hard to find. The few blogs that I did come across were tremendously helpful to me, and offered me more comfort than those bloggers will ever know.

I put my story online, and continue to update it today, so other aplastic anemia survivors might be helped like I was, and know that they aren’t alone. My aplastic anemia site can be found here:

http://aplasticanemia.brendangates.com/

You can also download a .pdf version of my aplastic anemia site here. It does not have a dark background like the live site, which might be a bit more readable for some.

And while I do try to keep my sites separate, my non-Aplastic Anemia blog does occasionally get an AA themed post. You can click here to see those posts.


My use of little reaper man on the aplastic anemia site isn’t meant to be morbid. I’m poking fun at death. Besides, wouldn’t you want your image of the grim reaper to be a little googly-eyed cartoon character? That’s not so scary.

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