DENVER A Denver doctor says his own experiences with cancer helped shape him into the physician he is today.Dr. Luke Mountjoy is a physician at the Colorado Blood Cancer Institute, but he didnt always want to become a doctor.I just wanted to be a firefighter or a police officer when I was young, said Mountjoy. I was actually, even in high school, I was working towards it. That was kind of the plan, one of the two.His life changed course forever when he was 14 years old.My dad was having abdominal pain and not feeling good, and he started getting jaundice or yellow, and unfortunately, was diagnosed with a pretty advanced pancreatic cancer, said Mountjoy. He started on his chemotherapies and stuff, but unfortunately, passed away within about four months of that. That wouldnt be the last time Mountjoy would come face-to-face with cancer.Two years later, I was having some pretty severe bony pain, said Mountjoy. People are like, 'Oh, you got shin splints.' Or I was playing basketball and they thought I got tendinitis or something like that. But it wound up getting substantially worse, to the point that I wound up in an emergency room and was diagnosed with acute myelogenous leukemia when I was 16.A normal white blood cell count is around 12,000. His was around 120,000. It became so severe that his blood started to become syrupy, and his organs couldnt effectively pump the blood through his body. In the middle of a 95-day hospital stay, he was getting his updates good and bad from his doctor, Dr. Lorrie Odom.When she walked into the room, her affect, her demeanor, her confidence, the way that she explained things, said Mountjoy. I mean, I'm 16 years old. I don't know anything about what's going on, and she was able to explain these things to me in a way that I could understand.At the time, the medical community didnt know as much about treating blood cancers as they do today. A question came up of whether or not to perform a stem cell transplantation, and Mountjoy's doctors were on the fence. If I did the transplant, I would have to have changed my physician to someone else, said Mountjoy. That was the tiebreaker, and it was an easy tiebreaker. I did not want to lose Dr. Odom as my physician, and she saved my life.He continued, After that experience of being in the hospital for a long time, sick and throwing up, and with what my dad went through and all of that stuff there was really nothing else that I could do with my life.After recovering and going through remission, he made it a goal to become a doctor who focuses on blood cancers. He wanted to give back to the medical world that saved his life, and he wanted to mirror his relationship with patients on how Dr. Odom treated him. Cancer patients, we just want to know that we're still okay, and that was the thing that I loved about her, said Mountjoy. When she walked into the room before she even sat down, she would just be like, 'Luke, your bone marrow is clean. Everything's fine. How are you doing?' You could just feel the weight come off your shoulders because Dr. Odom just understood how stressful these things are.Mountjoy considers himself lucky that hes in the position he is in today.I just want people to know that it's a temporary darkness and that there's hope, and that everything that we do here as a team here at Colorado Blood Cancer Institute, our whole goal is to move that needle forward, said Mountjoy. The patients and the physicians along the way that navigated this have got us to where we are today, and it's my life's mission to continue to carry that baton forward. To be a part of that, to be a part of the tip of the spear, like we are here at CBCI it's an honor. It's a dream job.