A Boring Intro

So, here I am. Looking down the steep and jagged cliff that I have to leap off of.  It has been such a fast and furious journey up until now.  I was diagnosed with lymphoma around November 8th (Election Day).  Since then, the cancer has grown aggressively to sprout large, painful tumors all over my legs in the subsequent three weeks.  I went to two oncologists, one at Kaiser and one at City of Hope.  Oddly enough, the Kaiser doctor did a more thorough examination, and understood the nature of my disease more clearly than the City of Hope doctor. Since my cancer is so rare, there is no staging process. But, the aggressiveness component was tested, and revealed to be at 90% aggressiveness. Not necessarily something that an "experimental" pill will likely address.

I am typically not an emotional person, nor am I prone to hysterics or crying jags. It must be my Korean heritage, but being strong is the only way that I deal with any sort of trial.  It is a pride thing.  Since my diagnosis, I think that I only really cried once, and not for very long. Maybe there is something wrong with me. I guess I don't feel it because although I am in a lot of pain on a daily basis, I don't actually look sick. I feel like I may be okay. But I guess I am just fooling myself. Regardless, it seems to be version of reality that I prefer, and the version that helps me to be strong and withstand the endless tests, needle pokes, scans, and the terribly painful bone marrow biopsy.

My son Evan is about a year and a half years old.  I am not really ready for another child, but they tell me that chemotherapy would cause infertility. So, I hopped onto the fertility bandwagon, and froze some fertilized eggs. A slight $20,000 detour, but well worth it, and made possible by generous help from both our families.  I really want Evan to have a sibling, and this way he can have one. I will just have to wait until I have a year of remission from the disease. I suppose Evan will be about 3 or 4 years old, which is a perfect amount of time between kids.  The whole IVF process only took two weeks. Amazing what science and technology has made possible for the women of today.

This delayed any decisions about treatment or chemo. But now that they extracted the eggs, we had to make a decision. CHOEP, a 5 drug chemotherapy combination. Here we go. We start Monday. Surreal.