When you are sitting at home, relaxing and watching your favorite show, you always see commercials for random medicines and hear the narrator say, “Side effects are… and other serious side effects are cancers such as Lymphoma…” People usually do not pay any attention because those words do not mean anything to them. Never did I think that one of those words would mean so much to me.
On November 14, 2012, I heard the words “Hodgkin’s Lymphoma” for what seemed to be the first time. I thought that I would have lived my entire life before I heard those words, or any of that sort. On that day I went to the emergency room at Emmanuel Medical Center with stomach pain that had lasted for a few months, but only seemed to get worse. After multiple doctor visits and tests – ruling out ulcers, acid reflex, pesticides – and being called a liar from a doctor who was proved wrong, a doctor finally decided to do an x-ray of my stomach, and what he found was not exactly what he was looking for.
The x-ray showed the bottom area of what was a large grapefruit-size tumor in my chest, behind my esophagus, in between my lungs, and directly to the right of my heart. The doctor came in and said “You do have a tumor in your chest, a rather large tumor, and it appears to be Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. You will have to set up an appointment with your doctor to schedule an appointment with an oncologist to get a biopsy.” He didn’t go into much detail, but he did manage to state the fact that Lymphoma is a type of cancer.
The next day I went to my doctor, and when he walked in he had a nervous look on his face, such as a mother’s face when she gets a call that her child has been suspended from school. He told us that he sent my x-rays to the oncologist at Valley Children’s Hospital in Madera, CA, and the oncologist called him back immediately saying that he wanted me to come to the hospital that night to get a biopsy. From the x-rays the oncologist saw, he pretty much knew that I had Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. Hearing this, my mom and I of course shed a few tears, but we were more worried than anything. We had confidence: we knew that these results were preliminary and that there was still a chance that my tumor was malignant.
