Surviving Cancer

Hi, my name is Elizabeth. During my senior year of high school I started losing an incredible amount of weight and with having a few extra pounds anyway I was like great I’m getting skinny finally! Wrong..In addition to the weight-loss i also had this incredible itching sensation that felt like I just couldn’t scratch it enough.

At the time I was 16 and still seeing my pediatrician unfortunately..they just thought it was eczema and thought the weight-loss was “just me maturing” so I was sent to a dermatologist for the itching and the weight-loss was just dismissed. The dermatologist gave me all kinds of creams and stuff to put on my scalp because i had itching there too. This solved nothing..the itching continued. I would scratch and scratch with anything sharp I could reach which caused these horrible sores which i still have scars from to this day. Well they gave me more and more creams to stop the itching nothing helped.

Then I had this lymph node on my neck that got a little bigger than a golf ball, well i was like okay so i have an infection somewhere, so my pediatrician that i was still seeing for some strange reason gave me antibiotics. So the lymph node got bigger and one day when i was walking through the doctor’s office to get my blood drawn a doctor says to me “Do they know what those rashes on your legs are from?” I responded “No, I’m just rubbing all kinds of cream on it.” She stated that I need to make an appointment with her. Okay so maybe she knows something everyone else doesn’t…So I made an appointment with her and when I go to see her she wants to biopsy the node on my neck. So i had the biopsy where they cut my neck open and then the results come back and I’m like okay it’s Hodgkin’s Disease..I’m only 17 years old I have no idea what this is. So they refer me to St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, TN. Now if anyone hasn’t visited this wonderful place I recommend that you do so.

The first time I was there they drew like 15 vials of blood from me god that was a lot of blood. They staged my disease at Stage 4, it was everywhere…They took me to surgery and put in a double lumen Hickman catheter to administer the chemo..Then we started chemotherapy that they flew back to my home state of Louisiana so I could be at home. They say I had the best response to chemo of anyone they have given it to. I only threw up one time when they gave me my Zofran too early before giving me the chemo

After I had finished all my chemo and lost all my hair I went back to St. Jude’s where they started radiation. They couldn’t believe how well I took the chemo and the radiation. I told them that I smoked marijuana thoughout my therapy and they said that might have been why I responded so well to the therapy but they did not approve of my smoking it. I’m not telling anyone to smoke it by all means, it was just something that I did. I was fine I wasn’t weak, had a good appetite and the radiation didn’t burn me at all. The most horrifying part of this experience was the way they take the Hickman catheter out..they laid me down on a examination table applied pressure and just pulled, which was kind of sickening but I was just glad to get that thing out, it iched and i couldn’t scratch it.

Well after all that the cancer was gone, I had to fly to St. Jude’s once every 3 months for a year then once every six months for two years and now i only have to go once a year. All of my check-ups were fine no sign of it coming back. Now I am 24 years old and have been cancer free for almost 6 years. I have many scars from my experience and am not ashamed of any of them.