Note: This post is excerpted from a longer piece on Blood-Cancer.com’s website and may be read in its entirety at https://blood-cancer.com/living/cll-surprising-symptoms/?utm_source=advocateshare

In the more than six years that I have been uneasily co-habitating the same body as chronic lymphocytic leukemia, I have learned – most involuntarily – a great deal about this cancer and its manifestations. For example, I learned relatively early on that CLL-compromised cells often like to hang out in one’s lingual tonsils, a part of my body that I did not know I even possessed. (I, like I daresay many my age or older, knew only of the more notorious tonsils – the ones removed after a sore-throat too many and that are extracted in the dubious exchange for “all the ice cream you can eat!”, which is truly misleading as no one feels like eating anything after having their tonsils removed – lingual or other.) . . . And these strange transfigurations of my body were before I underwent six months of chemotherapy. Now the list of problems, issues, maladies and general oddities has grown beyond that which I can list in 500 words or less. . . . But none of these strikes me as odd – or more immediately annoying – as a result of my cancer about which I just learned the other day.