D-d-d-diagnosis

When I was 18 years old I moved out to Victoria, BC to go to school. In November of that year, my third month at school, I felt a lump right above my collar bone. I had been having strep throat on and off for about three months so I thought nothing of it. It stuck around so I eventually asked a doctor about it. She told me it was a swollen gland, to ignore it and it would go away.

I ignored it but it didn't go away. In April 2001, I moved home for the summer. In May, I felt another lump, beside the original one but smaller. I went to see my doctor and she told me to get an ultrasound. The ultrasound of my neck showed more enlarged nodes so my doctor decided to biopsy the sucker.

I had my surgery on August 28, 2001, three days before I moved back out west. Thinking it was nothing, I nursed my new scar and carried on living in Victoria.

On September 14th, my mom called in the middle of the afternoon. She was crying but I tried to be confused. She told me I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma. She had gotten the results of the biopsy because I had already taken off out west. I had no idea what Hodgkin's Lymphoma was but it sounded bad. She said it was very treatable. She said I'd need chemotherapy and radiation. I'd always associated chemotherapy and radiation with cancer but somehow, at that moment, I temporarily convinced myself that they must be used to treat other things too. But I decided to make sure. When I asked if it was cancer and she said yes, I had no idea what to do with myself.

I was in a daze for the next few days. I remember not wanting to buy groceries because I wasn't sure if I'd be around to eat them. Not that I thought I was on the brink of death, but absolutely everything seemed so completely abnormal and unstable that carrying out daily tasks seemed ridiculous.

My mom flew out three days later and I spent the next few weeks seeing doctors and doing tests (CT scans, bone marrow biopsies, blood tests, etc...) to determine what stage I was at. Before the CT scan, the oncologist told me she figured the cancer was only in my neck so in that case I'd have two months of chemotherapy, a month break, and 6 to 8 weeks of radiation. But then the CT scan showed that the cancer had spread into my chest, putting me at stage 2. Plans changed, and I was to have 6 to 8 months of chemotherapy and no radiation due to its risk of causing breast cancer.

I would get chemo once every two weeks and it would consist of four intravenous drugs. My first chemo was October 12th in Victoria. After some very difficult deliberation, I decided to move back home to Ontario to do the rest of my treatment.