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Cody Lee is a WHUS family member who was recently diagnosed with Non-Hodgekins Lymphoma. He has decided to keep everyone up-to-date with his experience by occasional postings on WHUS.org. Cody joined WHUS in the summer of 2010 and is currently a sophomore at UConn. If you'd like to get in touch with him, you can email him here. Follow Cody's posts here.
I’d like to apologize for not doing this sooner. I know I promised I’d get the word out once I was out of my coma, but it turns out recovery from something like that takes a good bit of time, and this is the first I’ve felt up to it. I was out for 5 days and 14 hours, and I was told my odds of survival were 80%. That sounds good, until you realize that’s a 1/5 chance of never waking up, and I’d be safer playing Russian roulette, assuming there was only one bullet in the revolver. I’m completely fine now; I just found that to be interesting. It never really bothered me, but it seemed odd that the doctor who told me these odds was very objective about it. Most people would probably be upset by this, but I found her attitude towards it to be refreshing in contrast to all the people who constantly worry about me. But I didn’t have much time to chat, because my oxygen sats were dropping despite being on 15 liters of oxygen per hour and they couldn’t wait much longer to intubate me. They put me out, and the next thing I knew it was 5 days later, and I was hallucinating lizards all over the walls as a side effect of the medications I was on. The hallucinations lasted about 2 days, and were probably the most interesting experience I’ve had through all this.
For the next week, my memory was only working some of the time. By this I mean I wasn’t forming new memories, and I’d forget things within a day. A lot of what I know about that first week is from what I’ve been told by my parents and others who were around me. I do remember that I couldn’t walk much and that my arms didn’t work very well. I was amazed at how much my muscles atrophied in just over 5 days. At the end of the week, once my brain was more or less functional, my body was still weak. They sent me home exactly 3 weeks after I was put in the hospital for this round of chemo. I still had issues with strength and balance, but I was strong enough to make it out for opening morning of fishing season for 20 minutes (priorities). Ever since then I just keep getting better. I’m not as strong as I was before, but I can think clearly again, I have my balance back, and I can get around well enough. The only disappointing thing I have to deal with now is having my treatment pushed back 2 weeks, which is just 2 more weeks until I get my life back. Luckily, it’s not too far off and the last round of chemo is starting this Monday.