The Healthy Man's Cancer

Where were we... Oh! Yes....

The next few years were spent fighting EBV and not being very successful. There were routine colonoscopies and dealing with high blood pressure. By the way if you ever want to feel like a god, go to an ER with a bp of 210/90; it's like you have a bomb on you and they will do anything to make sure you don't set it off. That was fun, painful but fun.

Around April of 2002 I noticed a lump in my neck just above my collar bone. The liver clinic went nuts. They did a biopsy the day they found it which showed Lymphoma. When they told me I had it Dr. Nour said, "I hope you are a praying man," and then, "It's not technically cancer."

When I asked him what he meant, he said, "It's Post Transplant Lymphoma (PTL)."

When I asked him to explain this, he said, "Because it occured after the transplant it's not considered full blown Lymphoma but PTL."

This meant if I had been a healthy person I would be dealing with a very nasty form of cancer, but because I wasn't healthy it's just Lymphoma. And my doctor had just admitted that he may not have the answer.

He wanted to start treatment immediately, which meant I would have to drop out of school. I don't know if it was my desire to finish the semester or the fact that my faith in God had grown so big that I said, "No, you can do what you want in three weeks but you can not touch me until after finals!"

They agreed to my demands and started treatment after the semester was over. The treatment was three one hour IVs a day and one three hour treatment of IV twice a week. So summer semester was hard and I had to take three classes to get financial aid to cover it. I was supposed to have treatment for six months, but after three months they did a MRI and could not find any "technically not cancer" in me. They were amazed, I knew it was God.