The Beginning

At the tender age of 19, having just graduated high school I discovered that I had non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. The path to this discovery started out simple enough. I was a 19 year old kid, addicted to using the Internet, and my mom asked me to see the doctor because I seemed lethargic. You can probably imagine my response. It was something like, "You're crazy mom". It took her swearing to never ask again before I went to the doctor and I was immensely positive that there was no problem.

Imagine my surprise when I walked in and the first thing the doctor said was, "I think your neck looks swollen." Uhh... okay? So I got sent for a series of ultrasounds and then CT scans.

Imagine it's June 1992, the day I'm supposed to be finding out what the heck they think is wrong with me. I'm at work as a lifeguard at the YMCA in Lakewood, WA and I call home to find out what the doctor said. The response was, "Well talk about it when you get home." Alarming. Next I request emergency time to go home from my boss Jonathan and got the big, "NO". So I worked until my shift was up, went home, and was told that doctors believed I had cancer.

The next day, a Saturday, Dr. Alfred Chan was kind enough to come in on his day off so that he could do a bone marrow biopsy on me and get the process started. I'll skip the details of that but suffice it to say that one should NEVER claim you have a high tolerance for pain when a doctor is asking if he can scrape around inside your bones with two-handed needles.

The diagnosis came back soon afterwards, "stage IIIb non-hodgkins lymphoma" and so began my ongoing fight with cancer.

It took six months of chemotherapy with treatments two weeks on and two weeks off each month till I was in remission. There were also massive doses of prednisone to support my almost non-existent immune system, a 2 week stay in the hospital at one point after getting DVT, huge amounts of weight gain--damn prednisone, and more fun. It was hard but I got through it.

I say "got through it" because I survived. I didn't feel like I beat cancer then, I don't feel like I beat cancer now, and I don't know if I'll ever feel like I beat cancer.  But damn it, I'm going to try.