Parents Pen a 'Survival Guide' to Leukemia

Shaken and ready, the can in Dani Greene's hand draws the attention of the apron-clad 4- and 5-year-olds sitting at the table in front of her.

"Okay, we're going to play with shaving cream," the special education preschool teacher says in a sing-song voice.

"No, it's glitter," Niles Ayers, 5, corrects her.

"Okay, today we're going to play with glitter, but it's white and sometimes people call it shaving cream," Greene happily surrenders.

For the next 15 minutes, the seven children and their teacher will get lost in tracing letters and shapes with unsteady fingers. They will giggle and squeal and become coated in the lesson plan up to their elbows.

Only five years ago, on another summer day, Greene would write in her diary about how she longed for a day like this. How after receiving a diagnosis of acute myelogenous leukemia at 26, and undergoing a bone marrow transplant, she wanted to work: "I want to feel like I make a difference. I want to come home and have a story about my day, whether good or bad . . . I want the hair to stop growing on my back, my neck, my shoulders, my arms, my face, and my legs. I want to feel pretty and thin. I don't want to feel like people know me before they meet me as 'the girl with cancer.' " Passages like this make the book her parents recently published about the family's ordeal feel intimate, feel like one is sitting with Greene in 2002 when she learns there is a 99 percent chance she has leukemia and she futilely clings to the 1 percent chance she does not.

The book, "It's Good to Know a Miracle: Dani's Story," is far from a bestseller. The Maryland couple who wrote it, Jay and Sue Shotel, had to pay for it to be printed, and on an average day recently, it had a sales ranking of 383,434 on Amazon.com. The couple estimates that 500 have sold.

But even as sales remain small, the words of this local family are already reaching across the country and serving as a survival guide of sorts for families dealing with cancer.

The book landed in Jennifer Muri's hands last month, a little more than a year after her father, Robert Muri, got a diagnosis of acute lymphoblastic leukemia at 46.

"Before, he was a really strong, healthy guy," Jennifer Muri, 25, of Spokane, Wash., said. "There was nothing wrong with him. No physical problems whatsoever."

Then her father came down with the flu in May of last year and couldn't get well. Like Greene, Robert Muri was prepped for chemotherapy within 24 hours of his diagnosis. Jennifer Muri said that her stepmother gave her the book and that she read it in two days. She has also turned back to it amid the blur of hospital visits, comforted by the parallels she can trace between her father and Greene.

Although the book delves into the family's emotions, it is grounded in the medical reality of Greene's situation. The pages are filled with definitions of such words as "neutropenic" and "albumen."