GREENFIELD — There were 30 minutes of Andy Gililland’s life where death loomed over his hospital bed. He was shrouded by a plastic bubble as his sister held his hand through a hole, as his friends were inconsolable, as his mother prayed with rosary beads that her only son would somehow survive to watch another Notre Dame football game, to play pickup basketball with his friends, to serve hamburgers at the McDonald’s where he was climbing the fast food ranks as a young manager.
The doctors never tried to sweeten the sour prognosis Gilliland faced the day after Christmas in 1989 when he was diagnosed with acute lymphoblastic leukemia, an aggressive form of cancer that attacks the white blood cells. While the disease was mostly found in children and could be treated with success, in adults the rate of survival was much lower.
Gilliland was 23 and remembers the odds doctors at IU Health University Hospital gave him, ones he couldn’t look up on Google, that said if all went exactly as planned, he had a 30% chance of beating this brutal disease…