Full remission good news for gritty LeBlanc
Intergovernmental Affairs Minister Dominic LeBlanc, hit with a leukemia diagnosis late last year, has now received the two words that all cancer patients want to hear: “complete remission.”
It took six treatments of chemo-immunotherapy — administered intravenously over two days every month at a Moncton hospital, but LeBlanc recently got the good news that the procedure was “highly successful.”
“It’s a full remission, a complete remission,” LeBlanc said in an interview with the Star this week. His doctor, he says, “thinks it feels like a long-term solution.”
That doctor, Dr. Nicholas Finn at Moncton’s Dr. Georg- es-L. Dumont University Hospital Centre, has indeed said in a statement: “We do not detect any evidence of residual leukemia on imagery and laboratory tests. As his hematologistoncologist, I can say that Minister LeBlanc’s response to treatment was the optimal outcome that we had hoped for at this point.”
The leukemia diagnosis came late last year after routine blood tests were turning up high counts of white blood cells. While LeBlanc was initially shaken by the news, he was quickly reassured that this was a non-aggressive form of cancer — known as “chronic lymphocytic leukemia.”
“It’s the lazy kind,” LaBlanc’s doctor told him. It was also highly treatable.
So a couple of days before his 50th birthday last December, LeBlanc went in for the first of the IV-drip sessions. Along with a dozen or so other cancer patients, the federal minister and childhood friend of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau would spend a day and a half each month sitting in a hospital treatment room, getting to know some of his fellow New Brunswickers on a whole different plane.
“I was struck by the people I would talk to during those days, many of whom were sicker than I was, considerably sicker than I was,” LeBlanc said. “I was struck by some young people there.”
He quickly fell into the routine, managing to work or keep himself occupied while hooked up to the IV machine. It kept him in a chair all day Thursday and half a day on Friday, every month for the first half of this year.
“You sit in a chair. You play with your iPad. You can send messages on your Blackberry. You can read the newspapers,” LeBlanc said.
Friends would pop by; they’d share take-out food or sandwiches from the hospital cart.
One of his pals, a doctor in the same hospital, once brought a stack of take-out pizzas for everyone, including the staff.
The experience has left LeBlanc with a profound respect for the health-care workers he met along the way, especially those who worked day after day in those cancer-treatment rooms, always caring and professional to patients who are often sick or scared.
LeBlanc had hoped to get through this brush with cancer with minimal intrusion on his work as a minister and by and large, that’s how things turned out, he said.
His boss, with his long friendship to LeBlanc, was obviously sympathetic. After learning of the leukemia diagnosis, the prime minister called his old friend into the office; he’d looked up the disease online and had questions, including about how LeBlanc, his wife Jolene and family were handling the news.
“To be honest, I told him I wanted to focus on my work,” LeBlanc said.
With the treatments behind him, that’s LeBlanc’s plan for the immediate future — and the long term. “They were quite clear that I could expect to have a considerably productive number of decades ahead of me,” LeBlanc said.