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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.
My oncologist had been consulting with others in her field about me. None of them agreed with the decision to reduce my chemotherapy. The only data on Burkitt’s lymphoma is for the full four rounds of chemo, with the full doses. My odds of being cured after one full treatment are 97%, and she doesn’t want to risk a relapse in someone so young. I was very unhappy about this as it meant more time in the hospital and another semester without a radio show, but having it all over by July 17th still didn’t seem too bad. All this transpired between the 14th and 15th week. As I write this, it is the last day of my 16th week.
Today, I went in for blood work, and was told that my platelets aren’t coming back the way they should. This means that my bone marrow isn’t doing very well. Fortunately, there is no mystery behind that fact. I’m getting extremely high doses of chemotherapy, and bone marrow takes a lot of abuse from that. The downside to this is that I need my bone marrow to be doing well. They can’t continue my treatment unless my marrow is strong enough to take the abuse, and I have three days for it to get to that point. If it doesn’t recover by the first day of my next round I’ll need a biopsy and we’ll be left with three options. The first option is to reduce my treatment again, the downside of which was already explained. The second option is to delay treatment until I recover which is also risky and could turn out badly if the cancer isn’t all gone. The third option is to continue as planned and hope my bone marrow can handle it. None of these are particularly good and my oncologist has yet to decide which would be best. That’s all the news I have at this point, but I’ll likely post again in a week to let everyone know how this mess turns out.