My History

Why am I writing this blog?  The simple answer is that I developed non-Hogkins T-Cell Lymphoma – a form of blood cancer that is ‘easy to treat, but hard to cure’.  Unfortunately when my oncologist told me that when I was first diagnosed, I didn’t ask him the obvious follow-up question: What exactly does ‘easy to treat, but hard to cure’ mean?

Here’s what I thought my doctor meant when he said ‘easy to treat, but hard to cure’:  I figured the masses I had would be responsive to chemotherapy and that I’d go into remission.  I figured that maybe five or so years later they might reappear again, but I’d just do another round of chemo.  Like shampoo, I figured I’d lather, rinse and repeat as often as necessary until I finally died of old age.

I was wrong.

My oncologist used CHOP chemotherapy on me during my first round of treatment.  That’s a specific mix of four chemo meds commonly used to treat lymphoma.  After six sessions, each three weeks apart, a follow-up PET scan showed no hot spots.  I’ll discuss this test in more detail later, but for now suffice it to say that a PET scan is similar to a CT scan, and a hot spot is a location that stands out on the test result and is likely to indicate cancer.

Quarterly PET scans for the next year and a half showed the same great results – no hot spots.  Unfortunately for me, around the twenty-month mark a hot spot appeared on my upper right arm.  A biopsy confirmed that it was the lymphoma restaging.  A second round of chemo began, this time using a mix called ICE.  At the end of six sessions, each just a week apart this time, a PET scan showed no hot spots.  Despite that good result, my oncologist immediately put me in the queue for a stem cell transplant.

Why?

As it turns out, the restaging of my lymphoma after twenty months was an indication that some cancer cells had become resistant to the CHOP chemicals.  The odds were that even though the ICE treatment had eliminated the newest hot spot, my cancer would eventually restage again, probably in half the time as the previous remission – in my case perhaps as few as ten months.  By this logic a third successful treatment could be followed by a restaging after five months, and so on and so on…

As you can see, the pattern is not a good one.

And since each restaging is an indication that some cancer cells have become resistant to the previous chemo mix administered, each new treatment round has to use a new chemo mix.  Unfortunately T-Cell Lymphoma, which is fairly rare and therefore does not have as much research time spent on it as other, more common cancers, had only three treatment options available to us at the time.  One of them – ICE – hadn’t even been available for clinical use just twenty months before I was treated with it.

The bottom line is that generally there are not enough tools in an oncologist’s toolkit to successfully handle a resistant and restaging cancer.

That left me with one option to try to eliminate this ‘easy to treat, but hard to cure’ cancer; a bone marrow transplant.  As it turns out in my case this meant the latest innovation to bone-marrow transplantation – a stem-cell transplant.

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