Initial History and Symptoms.

When did you first know that you had lymphoma and what were your symptoms? 

At the beginning of November, I started experiencing low grade fever and chills with a mild non-productive cough.  I was struggling to run, but I was still trying to recover from plantar fasciitis that I somewhat attributed it to just being "out of shape".  I seemed to be deteriorating rather quickly though (couldn't do an under 8 minute mile without feeling short of breath or heart pounding).  I had no URI (upper respiratory infection) symptoms or any other signs of infection (I even checked my urine to be sure it wasn't a low grade UTI (urinary tract infection).  Just when I was about to pursue further workup of the fevers, I started feeling better.  But, this recurred about a month later (around 12/17) with the fever/chills/extreme fatigue and nonproductive cough.  I even fell asleep during a comedy act that we attended on our anniversary on 12/18 (and it was only 8:30 pm).  When it didn't resolve by Christmas, I knew something was wrong.  I had one of my partners call in an antibiotic for possible pneumonia, before we left town on Sunday for the Lake Wenatchee cabin.  After 3 days of antibiotics, incessant drenching night sweats, I suspected it could be lymphoma.  I did my reading on UPTODATE.com and realized I needed a chest xray and some labs (including LDH and CBC), so I made an appointment with Dr. Esser for the day after we return from the cabin (12/31).  She luckily volunteered to squeeze me in early enough such that I could get a CT-chest done that same day (once we saw the grossly enlarged mediastinal (middle chest) lymph nodes.

After getting the confirmatory CT-chest that showed lymphoma involvement into the chest and abdomen, it was a matter of determining the type of lymphoma from there.  I was setup to see Dr. Liddy Klaff, pulmonologist on Monday (1/4) for a possible bronchoscopic ultrasound guided biopsy (aspiration primarily), but after discussing my case with Dr. Carol VanHaelst, it was agreed that a larger biopsy with more tissue would be better and this could be accomplished by a surgical biopsy called a mediastinoscopy.  The mediastinoscopy entailed an incision at the base of the neck anteriorly and then her would remove lymph nodes that were easily accessible.  According to Chris (my husband), he ran into some large nodes right after getting into the mediastinum and took these out as well as taking a large chunk out of the largest lymph node that was obstructing some of my bronchi and constricting my pulmonary artery (which explained why I was short of breath and heart pounding whenever I tried to run).

They do a lot of testing off the tissue they remove during surgery but one of them is a frozen section that the pathologist can look at immediately to give a preliminary diagnosis based on architecture of the tissue.  In this case, they felt it looked consistent with Hodgkin Lymphoma.  Since Hodgkins is not only treatable, but also curable, everyone seemed to be excited about this diagnosis.

"I'm not afraid of storms, for I'm learning to sail my ship." -- Louisa May Alcott