Welcome to Teo's Website

My friends Corey and Matt on the visit up here and Annette giving me some bunny ears before she performs a bone marrow biopsy with her little light.

The beginning of the staff tribute, it's not entirely done, but should be soon. Everyone should check it out sometime, because these people brought me my new life. That,and they are the most awesome staff possible. So please check it out, especially when I have the captions up, which will be soon.

Latest news: I got back to Colorado on May 17th, however for next two weeks I started feeling sick and eventually couldn't keep any food or liquids down. I lost 12 lbs and was severly dehyrdrated. So they threw me in the hospital for a week. All of it was caused to GVHD ( graft versus host disease ) in my stomach. They put me back on steroids and right now I'm feeling just fine. I'm eating on my own and not feeling a bit sick. I'm also on TPN which is IV food right now, just to get my weight back up to what it used to be. However, since I'm just one lbs away from my natural weight of 185 lbs, they are going to stop the TPN tomorrow night. YAY!!!! Talk to you all later. -Teo


Hey all,
This may possibly be my last entry, however, I wanted to thank all of you for your kind words of encouragement and support. They all have helped me in some fashion. I want to let you know that I have been back to school now for over a year. I'm taking a heavy credit load this semester and keeping EXTREMELY busy. My last biopsy (1 year marker) showed that I am 100% donor and no evidence of any leukemia left in my body. Also, I received my first set of immunizations a month ago. My plans for the future are to become a high school math and science teacher. Once again, thank you all.

-Teo

Don't call that number that was up anymore, if you would like to give me a call its (612) 623-0729 I would really love to hear from you. Again don't call too late, plus I may be out when you call, this is the apartment number that my parents and I are staying at.

Hello everyone, for those of you that don't know me, I'll give you a quick bio about myself.

My name is Matthew Brady Ruggiero, I was born on March 28, 1983 in El Paso, TX. I lived there for 3 years then moved to Albuquerque, NM. I lived there for 13 years and met some great friends... you know who you are :). Then I moved to Broomfield, CO and met some more of my great friends. In my senior year of high school I was diagnosed with CML. Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia. Rough to hear at first but I've learned to deal with it. I started out taking Hydroxyurea and Anagralide. Then I was put onto Gleevec. I was able to go to college, at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Go BUFFS. I've played tenor drums in the marching band for two years. The band has been able to attend both Big XII championship games and both bowl games (Fiesta and Alamo). In the summer of '02 my leukemia relapsed. I looked for a bone marrow donor only to have no matches show up out of a search of 8.5 million donors. In lieu of this, I have opted to go with a double cord blood transplant in Minneapolis, MN. I have already experienced work up week. This website will be my outlet to my friends, family, and other's curious about my journey to slay the dragon called CML. You are welcome to email me with specific questions at teo010@msn.com and I will try to respond to them with some alacrity.



Welcome to my website. Hopefully this site will keep everyone well updated about my situation.
I'm not the greatest, hell I'm not even good with HTML right now, but I'll try and make this website
as good as I can.

-Teo

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