So, today is one of those rare, non-poker-related posts. Although, I will say that I think the results from today are directly analogous to some of the lessons learned in poker.
The background in short detail is that my father has a condition called myleofibrosis. It's unfortunately terminal. When he was first diagnosed, shortly before my birthday last year, I was devastated. My mother had just gone through her second cancer -- this one far more aggressive than the first one -- and my brother had just had an extremely bad scare with his cholesterol (which was so bad that the doctor immediately brought him to the emergency room). It would only get worse when my father -- on top of the terminal cancer -- suffered an aortic dissection, which is fatal within 24 hours in 80% - 90% of all people who experience it. It's -- quite literally -- when your aorta splits apart.
So, in September of last year, the morning after he suffered the dissection, I flew down to Florida with a black dress, "Mangy Dog" poems that I planned on reading at his funeral, and two boxes of Kleenex.
I had never felt so helpless or out of control as I had during that time and in the months that followed. It was made all the worse by me living so far from home. Aside from the few times that I was able to fly back to help, my brother and Mom were the ones emptying the catheter bag, taking him to the emergency room in the middle of the night, and dealing with the horrific mood swings brought on by the medication. In the week after he survived his dissection, I stayed with them and we ended up in the emergency room 6 out of 7 nights. To say it was touch-and-go would be an extreme understatement.
Once I left my family and went back home, it seemed like there was nothing I could do. That feeling was a far worse feeling than anything I've ever encountered.
In the coming weeks, once the threat of my Dad's aortic dissection was outweighed by the ongoing threat of his myleofibrosis, we started to look more seriously into experimental treatment options that could help. The only one present to date is Revlimid, which still isn't FDA approved for myleofibrosis -- only for multiple myleoma, which is different. Initial tests show that it works in 30 - 40% of all patients with myleofibrosis; so, still not great odds. But. it's, to date, the only known treatment for the condition.
Worse still is that, even if your doctor recommends the medicine, if your insurance denies you coverage like my family's insurance did (because of the lack of FDA approval), it costs $11,000 - $12,000 a month. If my Dad took the drug, my family (who were frugal and saved their entire lives) would have been -- quite literally -- bankrupt in 2 and a half years.
My father told me privately that he would not die and leave my mother penniless. He would refuse the medicine. I believed him.
The next two weeks I spent more time online than I have ever spent in a row. I didn't sleep. I wrote to the FDA. I wrote to my Congressmen. I wrote to anyone who might possibly listen. I researched trial cases in Europe. I looked into experimental trial cases in the U.S. I looked for generic versions of the drug in the U.S. I had nearly given up when I had an idea at about 4am, 3 weeks into the problem: Why not look for generics abroad? So, I finally found the right combination of obscure Google terms and, after looking at approximately 200 pages, I found it: A reputable company abroad that promised a generic version of this drug for my Dad for $600 a month.
Today I got the news that the blood counts are back and that my father is looking to be in the 30% to 40% who respond to this drug. He will still die, but we're potentially looking at 6 or more years versus 1-2.
This is a terribly emotional post for a poker blog. But, I think it has applications. I can't recall how many times I've been at a table with a player who, after a few bad beats, gets frustrated, loses his or her brain, and starts playing poorly. In this case, after a good many nights of crying and wallowing in the situation, I decided to take a stand and use my wits (or what little wits I had). While I stood a slim to nill chance of being able to get my Dad the medicine on the cheap and an even slimmer chance that it would actually work for him, the payoff/pot odds for the effort were indescribably, immeasurably high.
While, most of the time, when you're on such a desperate draw against all odds, you can take comfort that you made the correct decision mathematically; on occasion, you luck out, save the day, and, against all odds, win the tournament.
It's not every girl who gets to say with some certainty that she saved her father's life -- at least for a while. But, in this case, he would have never taken that medicine if we didn't find the cheaper alternative (I get my stubbornness from him). In this case, I hit my unlikely four-of-a-kind on the river.
It reminds me to always remember the possible payoff, despite the occasional less-than-favorable odds. Because, in this case, 3 weeks of sleepless nights and research more than accounted for the pot odds of an extra few years.
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