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"Dr. Wong literally went from full-time employee, engaged in holiday festivities and 'connected' via the Internet, to a person who was on sick leave, stuck in a hospital bed with all medical personnel and visitors greeting him wearing masks in less than a week."
Janice Sakuma, Kaiser nurse
Dr. Bradley Wong labored as he walked through the Kahului Airport the day after New Year’s.
The active, healthy 49-year-old doctor of internal medicine knew that something was amiss. His physician instincts told him this was not right.
Nothing serious, though; some weird infection, the Kaiser physician thought.
He’s a doctor, he should know. But in this case, his more than two decades of medical knowledge and practice would not give him insight into what was to come next.
A blood test revealed abnormalities. By the weekend, Wong was in Maui Memorial Medical Center for tests.
The diagnosis came back. He had acute lymphocytic leukemia, a blood cancer.
The doctor was now in a fight for his life.
It was off to Kaiser Moanalua on Oahu, where the diagnosis was confirmed. Chemotherapy followed. He nearly died — not of leukemia, but of pneumonia, a risk of treatment that compromises the immune system.
His doctors were able to fight the infection while clearing the cancer cells from his system. Wong returned to Maui in late February.
While his last three bone-marrow scans have shown no signs of the cancer cells, he is not cured, and there are still questions about his long-term health. The doctor has the Philadelphia chromosome, a cancer marker that indicates a high likelihood of recurrence of the cancer despite chemotherapy treatments.
His ultimate cure is a bone-marrow transplant, which is the main reason this matter-of-fact doctor is bringing his story to light, according to his friends.
Wong’s best bet for a match was a sibling, either his brother or sister. In a cruel twist of fate, they matched each other, but not the doctor.
“I was the oddball,” he said in a phone interview last week. “I have to go find an unrelated donor.”
After encouragement from Kaiser colleagues, he decided to lend his name and picture to a marrow-registry drive Friday at Kaiser’s Maui Lani and Wailuku clinics, Maui Memorial Medical Center and the Queen Ka‘ahumanu Center; and Saturday at the Maui Swap Meet.
“It’s taken a while to get to this point,” said Janice S. Sakuma, registered nurse in home health at Kaiser. “I finally told him, ‘We are going to do this with or without you. It’s OK.’ As the date got closer, he got more amenable to coming forward.”
While the drive may help Wong find a match, Sakuma added that the community will benefit as well by expanding the registry. There are about 10 people in Hawaii looking for donors, she said.
“This is a numbers game,” Sakuma said. “The greater the numbers, the higher the chances of a match.”
As Wong waits for a bone-marrow transplant and fights the cancer, the doctor has learned things about himself, about being a doctor, about his patients and about the people he’s touched in his more than 20-year practice at Kaiser.
He came to Maui by accident.
The Punahou School graduate grew up on the backside of Diamond Head in the Kaimuki-Waialae area. Wong got hooked on medicine while volunteering in an Oahu emergency room during high school.
“That’s where it started,” said Wong, who will turn 50 next month. “It was exciting, pretty neat.”
He got his undergraduate degree from the University of Washington and his medical degree from the John A. Burns School of Medicine at the University of Hawaii. Wong did his residency in Massachusetts.
His plan was to return to Oahu after completing his residency. He got a job at a Kaiser facility on Oahu but, due to miscommunication, didn’t learn about it until too late. The position was filled.
Kaiser had a Maui opening, so he and Kaiser “swung a win-win” deal, the doctor said. He would be given a temporary position to learn if he liked living on Maui, and Kaiser Maui would get a chance to see if they liked him.
“The temporary position turned into a permanent one in probably less than two months,” he said. “I enjoyed it here.”
That was 21 years ago. He took to Maui’s outdoor activities and has no desire to return to Oahu. He raised his family here with Nancy, whom he married just before coming to Maui. They have two sons: Andrew, a college sophomore, and Alex, a high school senior.
The idea of doctors getting sick may seem foreign to many who see physicians only as healers. Doctors seem at times to be above the fray, the illness. The reality, though, is they are human and susceptible to the same sicknesses as everyone else.
Looking back, Wong said the first symptoms of his leukemia probably surfaced around the holidays last December. He had fever and chills intermittently during the evening.
“I thought I had a weird flu,” Wong said.
In reality, the symptoms were a sign of a weakened immune system caused by the leukemia.
“The big trigger” occurred when Wong was walking through Kahului Airport on Jan. 2 after returning from a trip to Oahu.
“I got extremely winded. It never happened to me before,” he said, noting that he is an avid diver, fisher and golfer. “In my medical mind, I was thinking . . . something was going on here.”
The shortness of breath was caused by anemia, another sign of leukemia.
His was “a relatively dramatic presentation,” he said, one that really could not have been predicted much sooner. If he had gone to the doctor as his wife had suggested when he had the flulike symptoms in December, there might have been a diagnosis a few days earlier.
“We (doctors) do a lot of self-diagnosis,” Wong said, adding that “we’ll drag our feet” about going to see a colleague about an illness. He dismissed his wife’s call to go the doctor with, “It’s just a cold.”
Leukemia was not on his chart of possibilities.
“Initially, that (leukemia) wasn’t even on the list,” Wong said. “I thought I had some really goofy infection going on.”
Wong has had to deliver his share of bad news to patients through the years and learned that everyone deals with the news in his or her own way, though there are stages that can be identified.
“It was a shock,” Wong said when he received the bad news. “My initial reaction was, ‘Oh my God . . . I might be dead shortly.’ ’’
Then he pulled himself together. He told himself to “think rationally. There are things that can be done . . . ‘Let’s fight this.’ ’’
Wong said the most difficult part was telling his family.
“I gotta be strong,” he recalled thinking. “I don’t know if it’s an Asian belief, but I’m the head of the household. I gotta be strong.”
He’s not sure if he went through the stages of grief.
“I know the stages, and I’ve seen people go through them,” Wong said. “It seemed like everything happened so fast. I probably went through all of them. It went through voom, voom, voom. I gotta accept this . . . do what I need to get done.”
He did spend a little time dwelling on the “why-me stuff” but not much.
“It was just one of those things,” he said. “I knew it wasn’t something I did wrong. I was dealt an unlucky card.”
Being a patient has given the doctor a new perspective on medicine, which he believes will make him a better physician. Wong always has considered himself empathetic to his patients, taking extra time to explain medical conditions and treatments, but now he can offer personal experiences as well. He’s been there, too.
“Being in the hospital, having all kinds of procedures done, you get an idea of what patients go through . . . and some of them are not real pleasant,” he said.
His understanding now goes beyond the major procedures he’s been through, like lumbar punctures and spinal taps, into more mundane areas. Take constipation: Wong would treat the symptom but never fully connect with his patients’ complaints. He does now.
“You get bloated when you eat,” he said, noting that constipation is related to medications he’s taking. “You eat less and less. Boy, this is uncomfortable. Now I understand what they are talking about.”
Another realization involves pills. Wong has never liked taking them but has to swallow four of them daily.
“I’m a really negative pill person in terms of wanting to take pills,” he said. “I have pill bottles all over the place. Oh my God, I can see the difficulties of taking all these pills.
“It’s not that easy to take pills. I’ve always known it . . . but to be there. . . . It is tough to have to take the pills, especially for someone like myself who doesn’t like to take pills.”
At the moment, his fight against the cancer goes well. He’s had five bone-marrow biopsies, and the last three have turned up negative, with no sign of cancer cells.
“I’ve really done well for someone with what I have,” he said.
His spirits are pretty good, though he’s bored.
“I’m not used to sitting at home doing nothing,” the doctor said. “All the shows I like I’ve seen all the reruns. It’s no longer interesting.”
He does have low moments, but he fends them off by “trying to break the cycle,” recognizing the depression and trying to do or think about something different.
“It is easy to feel sorry for yourself,” he said. “I think it’s important to be positive all the time. . . . People who are positive always seem to do better.”
He continues to fight the disease for himself and his family members, about whom he worries in down moments.
“I don’t know what to do,” he said. “I don’t know if I have anything I can do (for them). The big thing is to fight the disease and beat the disease, and hopefully my family will do fine.”
Wong doesn’t think having acute lymphocytic leukemia and facing his mortality have changed him as a person. He has been touched, though, by all of the help and encouragement he and his family have received.
“I’ve had an overwhelming amount of support from people I never expected,” he said. “That was the amazing thing.”
His Kaiser family has been particularly supportive through his ordeal.
“You walk around every day not realizing that there are people who are willing to go quite far to support you,” he said.
In addition to the marrow drive, the doctor’s co-workers put together the “Internet Joke Book” for him to pass the time while in the hospital. About the joke book, Sakuma said Wong must have been going through “Internet withdrawals” because he spends a lot of time “connected.”
“Dr. Wong literally went from full-time employee, engaged in holiday festivities and ‘connected’ via the Internet, to a person who was on sick leave, stuck in a hospital bed with all medical personnel and visitors greeting him wearing masks in less than a week,” said Sakuma in an e-mail.
“To make matters worse, he had no Internet access. The Internet Joke Book’s pretense was that he must be going through Internet withdrawals. The real gems were all the personal messages that friends and colleagues wrote on each page. We were able to present him with a 50-plus-page get-well card.
“Support looks different to different people. This gesture of support was geared to him.”
Sakuma noted that Wong has been a member of the Kaiser ohana for a long time.
“Brad worked with us for most of his adult life.” she said. “As adults we grew up together. We are family.“
Word got out that the doctor was ill and spread around the island. Though he says he’s not a religious person, Wong said, “I was in the prayers of half a dozen churches.”
While he seems to have the leukemia on the run for now, Wong has been weakened by the leukemia and the treatments. He would have more trouble making that same walk through the airport that raised all those red flags back in January.
“I don’t have strength and stamina to go out,” Wong said. “I can walk real slow. I can’t run . . . I couldn’t walk halfway around the block. I got winded.”
Going up and down the stairs in his house can be difficult sometimes.
“Every day is different,” the doctor said. “Some days are better than others.”
When he receives his bone-marrow transplant, his doctors say he’ll be “pretty much as good as normal,” Wong said. When that day comes, he may remember the encouragement he received from a cancer survivor.
The cousin of a good friend called the doctor out of the blue after he got sick. Wong often would get invited as the fourth for golf outings with his friend and the cousin when she visited the island.
The woman said she once had been given only a short time to live but beat the odds and her doctors’ prognosis. Twenty years later, she is still around, ready to offer Wong advice, encouragement and hope.
“You hang in there, but if you got something you want to do, do it,” she told Wong.
“I think I will (but) right now, physically I cannot,” the doctor said.
“Sometimes, we get so caught up in our world,” Wong continued. “If there is something you want to do, just do it.”
* Lee Imada can be reached at
leeimada@mauinews.com.
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