Lymphoma

I beat stage 4 lymphoma last year after six months of aggressive chemotherapy. Honestly, I wasn't given much information from my centers, but The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) reached out to me to inform me about all the aid and grants they offer to help those going through cancer.

I am a mom of four, married for 22 years, and was recently diagnosed with a very rare leukemia/lymphoma. I am a licensed speech-language pathologist, health coach, and have my own podcast. I began treatment in January of this year and will follow treatment with a bone marrow transplant. I am an encourager, and my desire is to use this diagnosis to bring hope.

Twenty years ago I did two things that shaped my life.

I am a teacher from Texas. My journey to Team and Training wasn’t immediate. I moved to Texas from Louisiana. When I moved to Texas, I decided to start running to meet people and to help with my homesickness.

It was July 2014, I got up and went for a quick morning jog before work. It’s Iowa, it was hot and humid, but I was unusually winded after that jog. I figured it was due to being humid outside and finished getting ready to go to work (I was a registered nurse at a physician’s clinic doing triage). During the day, I continued to feel a little winded and noticed I had a cramp in my calf.

I was diagnosed with stage 4 mantle cell lymphoma (MCL) in December 2020, but at the time, it was considered to be "indolent." That quickly changed in late February 2021 when I experienced intussusception, a painful telescoping of the bowel into itself requiring hospitalization. A colonoscopy revealed a 7 cm. mass of the cecum, and the biopsy showed that it was MCL.

I was diagnosed with Burkitt lymphoma (BL) when I was 21 years old. It was the summer going into my senior year of college, and I had just returned home from a semester abroad. I assumed the stomachaches I was experiencing were because of the food and drinks I had while enjoying my time in Europe. I was actually told I had H.