It's almost strange to use the word lucky when describing someone who had leukemia.

But after the year he has endured, lucky is exactly how Dan Mitchell talks about the situation.

It started in early October 2006. Mitchell, a Richland High School graduate, was doing some work in his driveway.

Now 55 and living in Middlesex Township, the heavy equipment mechanic had something like a small caterpillar drop onto his neck. His neck got itchy and red, possibly from an allergic reaction, so he went to see his doctor.

His doctor ran some blood tests that weren't really necessary for the situation. But his wife, Loretta, says he hadn't been there in awhile. So the doctor just wanted to run some tests to see how everything was going.

What he found out is that everything wasn't going well. Mitchell was diagnosed on Oct. 20, 2006, with acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer of the white blood cells.

"You felt like you were punched in the stomach," Loretta says of hearing the news. "It's almost surreal. He was perfectly healthy."

Mitchell says his appointment was on a Monday, and he found out that Friday about his diagnosis. The news forced him to start considering his life and his future.

"It's shocking," Mitchell says. "It sets you back a good ways."

Mitchell was at West Penn Hospital in Bloomfield within a week to start intense chemotherapy.

A tube was inserted into his neck and the chemo was pumped into his blood. His first session was 24 hours a day for seven straight days.

He then had 10 days of monitoring.

What the doctors wanted from the chemotherapy was to lower his blood cell count to somewhere between zero and 2 percent. The chemo is designed to eliminate the production of the cancerous white blood cells.

After the first treatment, his count had dropped dramatically to about 9 percent. But the doctors weren't satisfied with that number. So they put him on a second round of chemotherapy for another five days.

This time, the results were more to the doctors' liking and Mitchell was sent home to recover.

"It wasn't guaranteed remission," he says. "They treat people to a point and let them recover at home for awhile."

But calling it a home recovery might be a bit of a stretch. Mitchell found himself heading back to the hospital sometimes up to four times a week during the ordeal.

"There's a lot to this," he says. "There's a heck of a lot more than what people realize."

The treatments were really taking a physical toll on Mitchell as well. The chemo totally wiped him out and zapped all his energy. He says he couldn't even walk to the living room and back without "huffing and puffing."

While he was fighting this deadly disease, life for the rest of his family couldn't just stop. Loretta says it was a crazy year in the lives of the family members.

Their youngest son Chris, 23, graduated from Robert Morris University. Their oldest son Ben, 25, got married. And even while those happy occasions were being celebrated, the boys had their dad on their minds.

At that point, after his home treatment, Mitchell went back to the hospital for more chemotherapy. This time, it was three concentrated blasts for a couple hours in the morning and evening, every other day for six days.

Mitchell's doctors decided to try something different in early January. They told him that a stem cell transplant might be his best shot.

At first, Mitchell wasn't interested in the procedure, because he wasn't comfortable with that type of invasion on his body. There's also the possibility that he would have to get the cells from a national donor bank of people who would be complete strangers to him.

But Mitchell has a brother and sister. In another fortunate event, it turned out that his sister was a perfect donor match, which the doctors say isn't always the case with siblings.

"The numbers matched so well," Mitchell says. "I guess I relaxed a little more knowing that."

His sister didn't hesitate one second to help out her older brother.

The transplant took place at the end of February 2006. Donna, his sister, was hooked up to a machine that put a tube in each arm, says Loretta. She described the process as drawing blood from one side, filtering it through a machine to take out the stem cells, then replacing the blood.

The whole process took about four hours before doctors had enough to do the transplant.

After getting the blood and running some tests, the doctors inserted the stem cells into the tube in Mitchell's neck.

The procedure turned out to be a success.

Mitchell was out of the hospital by March and spent the summer recovering. His stamina is still low, but he started going back to work a month ago. Even though his energy isn't back to normal just yet, he's starting to feel like himself again.

"I feel lucky," he says of the situation. "It took a year out of my life. Actually it took a year out of my family's life.

"I'm lucky to the point that a lot of other patients that have gone through this had it a lot worse than I did."

Mitchell, who is currently in full remission, says there weren't any points where he was drastically sick at any time throughout the treatment process. It even amazed his doctors, he says.

And having his sister as a perfect match really helped the whole process.

"It was immediate," he says of his sister's willingness to help. "There was no question whether she was going to do it or not.

"It made it a lot easier and a lot quicker."