It’s in my email signature. That's the official VA list of the diseases that are presumptive. There are different percentages of disability. Some diseases are considered 100 percent disabled. If they have type 2 diabetes, they're probably going to come in somewhere around 20 percent disabled.
Could you tell me a little bit more about what you've gone through as part of this experience? Didn’t you have your second stem cell transplant recently?
Yes. There's no known cure for the disease, but it's quite treatable. The disease was fairly stable for about a year where it didn't need treatment. Since then I've had a number of treatments. The two most notable ones were stem cell transplants in August of ‘02 and in January of this year. In between I've been treated by a number of different drugs -- dexamethasone, prednisone and two new drugs that were not even in existence when I was diagnosed. The new drugs are quite effective on the disease. I was treated with Velcade in 2005, and the other is called Revlimid, and I was treated with that in 2007. The good news is that this disease is highly treatable, and there are new drugs coming to market regularly. At one point the average life expectancy after diagnosis was five years, and I was diagnosed nearly eight years ago, so I'm pretty happy about the way it’s gone.
I was so glad to hear that your comeback after the latest transplant was better than the first one.
I was surprised. I thought it would be worse. You know, I'm five years older, and I thought, 'Oh, this is going to be really tough.' And it was tough during the transplant, but once I got going, I really bounced back well. In fact, I'm getting fat again.
That's good. You want that.
Resources:
Cyber Sarge’s Agent Orange Pages
Veterans and Agent Orange: Update 2006, The National Academies Press
(Some content is free)
Vietnam Veterans Benefit From Agent Orange Rules, US Department of Veterans Affairs
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