Senior Reflects on Life with Leukemia

“I told her I wouldn’t trade it for anything,” he said with a smile as he leaned back into the chair, eyes closed and face to the ceiling.

Senior Brandon Perry, an accounting major from Denver, Colo., isn’t speaking of a funny moment from his past or his all-time favorite childhood memory. The “it” he’s referring to is his seven-year battle with leukemia.

Perry grew up in Denver in a “good, church-family home” where he was very involved in sports.

“Going into my freshman year of high school, I transferred to a big basketball school, hoping to eventually play in college,” Perry said.

He tried out for the team and made it, but after a while began getting unexplainable injuries and shoulder pains. After about a month, he was always tired and became very pale, but doctors could give him no explanation as to why.

“On my birthday, I was so sick and so weak I couldn’t even open my presents,” he said. “I couldn’t eat. I had no energy to take food and put it in my mouth and chew it and eat it. So then we decided it was time to do something.”

He was taken into the ER and was there for over a day before the doctor came in and gave him the news that he had leukemia, a cancer of the blood that is usually found in bone marrow or spinal fluid.

“They said it had been occurring over about three weeks, so I maybe had a couple more days to live,” Perry said. “But my doctor said the treatment for it had good returns. I think I had about an 80 percent chance.”

He immediately began chemotherapy and was homeschooled for the first six months of the process. After 34 days, he was diagnosed in remission, meaning there was no more cancer that they could find.

“That doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t have cancer when it comes to cancers of the blood,” Perry explained. “Leukemia is known as a smart cell because it can hide.”

When doing the tests, a only a tiny portion of all the blood in a patient’s body is tested. This means there could still be some left that doesn’t get picked up by the sample.

About six months into the chemotherapy, Perry had an allergic reaction to some of the chemo. The fat content of his blood cells was incredibly high, causing the blood to thicken and not flow as freely or as easily as it should through the body. This resulted in him having two strokes before he was even old enough to drive.

“My doctor was looking at me and saying there was no way I should have been living at that point,” Perry said.

After three and a half years of chemo, he was finally off three days before finishing high school, which he had been attending again, this time without playing sports.

“It was pretty cool. I did my senior speech in front of the thousands of people that were there,” he said. “They were all people who knew me and had been praying for me.”

After graduating, Perry started at Baylor University the following fall with a positive outlook on the future and getting the opportunity to start over.

“The Lord really got my life transformed with a life group and guys who really wanted to help me live a life fully for the Lord,” Perry said. “I really got to understand and know who God was in a deeper place.”

However, Perry said he always had a peace about leaving his life in the Lord’s hands from the time he was diagnosed in the ninth grade.

“I was never afraid of dying or anything like that. I just knew it was all in the Lord’s hands,” he said. “I’ve learned that I’m at my best when I’m at my weakest place because there’s more of the Lord and less of me.”

A way that Perry kept the interests and well-being of others above himself was by taking what would have been his junior year of college traveling to Haiti and Seattle to love on others with the love of Jesus. He also attended a discipleship school in Waco, Texas.

He then went back to school for a semester and was hired to be a director at a summer camp in Arkansas, where he met his fiancé, senior Kate Dodge.

“She is way outta my league. I’m super blessed,” Perry said. “She came with me and we worked camp there and it was a great summer.”

However, during the summer, he experienced random episodes where he woke up throwing up with tension in his neck. He didn’t think much of it because the pain always went away after a nap and wouldn’t bother him until the next time.

Towards the end of the summer, he began having tests done and discovered the cancer was back, this time in his spinal fluid.

He began the chemotherapy process again. This time, treatments were more intense because they wanted to be sure it didn’t come back again.

Two or three weeks into the chemo, he was again diagnosed in remission and was able to spend the next summer working the same camp again. Except this time, his summer of camp ended with proposing to Kate.

“She said yes and I’m still trying to understand why,” Perry said. “She’s been awesome. When I’ve been at my sickest, she’s been there to help me and still cared about and liked me.”

Dodge said she initially wanted to wait until he was completely finished with treatment to get engaged.

“But then I had a revelation one morning that marriage is about sickness and health,” Dodge said.

He enrolled at Ouachita last fall with 12 hours and made it through and is now in his second semester here. In May, Perry and Dodge will marry and move to Waco and in the fall, he will finish his bachelor’s at Baylor while she goes to the discipleship school he attended during his year off.

While at Ouachita, Perry is teaming up with Dr. Mike Reynolds, Dr. Terry DeWitt and the kinesiology department to work on creating and testing a recovery program for kids trying to get back on their feet after battling cancer.

“For all the kids that do the chemo I’ve done, there aren’t really any recovery programs. The hardest part for me and others is getting back into the normal routine of life,” he said. “When you’re doing treatment, that’s your life. You’re living from pill to pill and you schedule your whole life around appointments. You’re put on pause.”

The steroids patients have to take when on the therapy erode joints and can cause long-term problems. This is something Perry hopes to help through his partnership with the kinesiology students.

“I approached them and volunteered to be a guinea pig for a training program and nutrition plan and see how it goes and what we can do to help kids recover from what they’ve gone through,” he said.

Perry is now in his sixth week of the program and has seen promising results.

“I feel normal again, I guess; whatever that feels like,” he said. “Last semester, I would be pretty worn out.”

Perry says he makes an effort to not mope about campus, but some days he may look rundown, though he is in good spirits.

That same positive attitude that has brought peace and comfort to Perry and his family throughout this whole process.

“It’s really brought my family to closer places with the Lord,” Perry said.

Though the experience has strengthened his family, the hardest part about everything for Perry has been having to see his family deal with it.

“I couldn’t do that. I think I would have a really hard time to see, say, my brother get cancer. That would be devastating for me,” he said.

Another tough part for Perry has been not being able to interact with the other patients at the hospital and seeing constant sickness.

“We don’t get to interact because all of our immune systems are compromised. To see a lot of the hurting kids and not be able to share the love of Jesus with them and love on them is pretty difficult,” he said. “Just seeing the devastation in other kids at the hospital… I have it really good.”

Perry gives special credit to the nurses who work in those surroundings every single day and says they make the experience a lot more enjoyable when they’re happy and fun, which is especially important at a children’s hospital.

“I can’t imagine having their job. All they see is sickness, so I just try to go in there and give a little life to them and encourage them,” he said. “They’re pretty phenomenal people. It takes a gift to work in that environment.”

No matter how bleak and dreary that environment is, Perry is thankful for the series of events that has lead him closer to and grown him in the Lord.

“When I lost everything, He was the one that was still there. When I didn’t have anything, all I had left was to rely on the Lord,” Perry said. “It took me getting to that place to realize the importance of intimacy with God.”

The number one lesson he has learned is that the most important thing in life is to know God, because when everything is stripped away, without him you have nothing.

As he leans back in the chair and remembers the conversation in the hospital, his smile grows.

“It’s totally worth it to experience the Lord and see His heart for people,” Perry said with absolute certainty. “For me to get to know God so I can love people better and reach out to other people – that’s totally worth it. I would do it over and over again.”

Brandon Perry

• Birthday: Jan. 13, 1989
• Home: Denver, Colo.
• Favorite Color: Blue & Green
• Favorite Food: Chicka Tikka Marsala
• Favorite Music: Worship
• Biggest Influence: My brother and dad, Dr. Bryan McKinney, Carl Gulley and Mark Owen
• As a child, I wanted to: Play in the NBA
• Something I hope to accomplish: Become a church planter
• This year, I am most looking forward to: Marrying Kate Dodge and pursuing the things the Lord has planned for us

“I was never afraid of dying or anything like that. I just knew it was all in the Lord’s hands. I’ve learned that I’m at my best when I’m at my weakest place because there’s more of the Lord and less of me.”
— Brandon Perry