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I want to thank David Mumpower and his wife Kim Hollis for giving me the opportunity and an outlet to talk about my experiences and how the last nine months of my life was turned upside down, first by leukemia and then by my stem cell transplant, and I hope that it’s a learning experience for readers that this could happen to anyone at any time.

Some reading this may know me as the Weekend Warrior from ComingSoon.net, some may have known me even longer as “Shades” from the Hollywood Stock Exchange message boards… or “secret stalker” which is the handle I took when I was banned from those boards, which two years later I still am.

Not many people realize how important the Hollywood Stock Exchange has been to generating my interest in watching and writing about movies and for those who’ve read my weekly column The Weekend Warrior, I have to say that a lot of what I’ve written has been greatly influenced by some of the great box office predictors here at Box Office Prophets - David and Kim and especially Reagen. We haven’t always gotten along over the years, but David and Kim have proven to be hugely supportive during my sickness, proving to me that they are GOOD PEOPLE. I mean, I’m almost tearful when I think of all the stupid arguments we got into over the years on various message boards and the fact that they’d set all that aside to help me and make me feel better.





Anyway, the reason I want to write this and why I’m sharing with Box Office Prophets readers rather than at my normal outlet at ComingSoon.net is that it’s far more personal than I normally get with my writing.

Back in April, I was in Las Vegas - a place I connect with HSX, having gone there a number of times with various members of the forum - and I could barely get anywhere since I was dizzy, out of breath, had blurry vision and absolutely no energy. Anyone who has ever been to Las Vegas knows that wandering around the crowded sidewalk in that state is not good, but I’d actually been having problems for a few days and I figured I could go to a clinic in the morning, get some antibiotics or penicillin and I’d be all fine.

After going to a couple clinics, I ended up at the Sunrise Hospital where they took blood and a doctor who looked eerily like Sam Elliot came up to me and said in a blunt deadpan voice: “Your white blood count is at 350,000. You have acute leukemia. You’re not going anywhere.” That’s how I found out that I had contracted a disease that I knew very little about other than the fact that I remember having a close member of the family die from leukemia decades earlier. I was clearly sick and they had to stabilize me and get that white blood count down (normal is in the 10-20,000 range so essentially the leukemic white blood cells had taken over and made me anemic).

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