Ashley Myers' Story:
Diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease at age 15
Written by Ashley Myers

I was 15 years old the day my life changed forever. I sat daydreaming in health class when I first felt a strange lump below my collarbone. It felt a little odd, but I decided to check on it later. I had lots of things going on. A high school sophomore living in Bonne Terre, MO, with my mom and stepdad, I was busy with school, hanging with friends, and learning to drive. So I forgot about it for a while. Who knew I'd soon be unable to think about anything else? When I went to lunch a few hours later, my friend Lacie Smith was stunned to see a little lump that looked like a little egg sticking out from underneath my flesh. I knew it hadn't been that big in health class so I decided to have my school nurse take a look.

She was honest to say she didn't know what it was, so she had my mom come and pick me up from school and take me to the local hospital. There they did blood tests and took x-rays. They were honest to say that they didn't know what it was either. My mom then drove me up to St. Louis Children's Hospital. There doctors poked on me for a while, then ran x-rays which showed I had a mass, possibly due to an abnormal growth of cells, under my collarbone. The growth could be harmless, the doctors said, but the only way they could be sure was to run more tests. After a round of tests - some painful, some embarrassing and very scary - my family crowded into a room to meet with Dr. Hayashi who broke the news we'd prayed we'd never hear. Some form of Hodgkin's disease, a type of cancer, had invaded my body, and I needed more tests before he would know which form I had.

Hodgkin's? Cancer? It all felt so surreal. I understood every word he said. I was no dummy. My family sat very still. There were no tears, only an icy calm as we waited for an easy explanation that would solve everything. But it never came. I let it all wash over me that day, just waiting for more details - waiting to learn whether or not I would become one of the cancer-death statistics they show on the evening news.

Dr. Hayashi ordered more tests over the next week. The results would determine my chances for beating this thing and help us develop a strategy for fighting it. By my second visit with him, he had more information: I had stage 3 Hodgkin's. Doctors rate the disease on a 1 to 4 scale, slotting the most curable cases into stage 1 and the least curable cases into stage 4. If I didn't find the lump when I did, the outlook could have been horribly grim - stage 4 has only a 50 to 70 percent cure rate for recovery. Dr. Hayashi said that my type has about a 90 to 95 percent cure rate, which sounded great until I realized that at 15 I had about a 10 percent chance of not pulling through at all. As we scheduled my chemotherapy treatments, my mind went numb. It was just too much information to digest in one sitting. Still, while I thought I heard everything there was to know about my disease that day, nothing could have prepared me for the months of pain and terror ahead.

My chemo treatments ran about 2 to 3 months. Since it involved several drugs, the doses came in different forms. On certain days in the cycle, I took my doses in pills from home. On others I trekked to the hospital where I sometimes sat chained to an IV pole for four straight hours with a needle jabbed into my chest. The treatment room was packed with little kids who danced to Barney songs and blared arcade games as they waited their turns for therapy. Others sat pastyfaced in their chairs looking dazed and exhausted. I'd always pictured chemo as a bunch of weird potions and powders, but it wasn't like that at all, other than the horrible odor wafting from my IV bags.

Incredibly powerful chemo wipes out cancer by killing your body's fast-growing cells. But since the drugs can't tell the good cells from the bad cells, it also attacks a bunch of healthy cells your body needs to function in spots like the stomach and mouth linings, the immune system, and the hair follicles. Early in my first treatment of chemo, my hair began to fall off my head. While other kids worried about bad hair days, I agonized every time I cleaned up hair globs from floors and shower walls. Luckily my hair only got really thin and all of it didn't fall out. With school wrapping up, I had the whole summer to avoid the classmates who were too immature to handle my disease.

After chemo and radiation, my skin flared up in a rash which I first thought was poison ivy. I globbed on calamine lotion, but it hurt so much that not even extra-strength Tylenol let me sleep through the night. My doctor diagnosed me with shingles, a form of chicken pox virus that attacks the nervous system. Chemo and radiation had wrecked my immune system leaving me open to diseases most teens had never heard of. (Shingles usually hits frail, elderly people.) The feeling mushroomed from a stinging sensation all over my body to an intense radiating pain. I spent five days in the hospital chained to an IV, stuck in isolation so no one else could catch my virus. If I'd waited any longer to see the doctor, the outbreak could have attacked my lungs, brain, or liver causing permanent damage.

I could only get through weeks like that by squeezing laughter out of every situation. As I recovered from my shingles, I dashed off a list of cool things about being stuck in the hospital for a week:

1. Breaking free from parental rules after visiting hours.
2. Snagging 24-hour access to TV and phone.
3. Scoring visits from family, friends, neighbors, and anyone else who had already had chicken pox.
4. Getting chest exams from hot doctors.
5. Cracking up when my bra caught on IV tubes - lucky that I have a sense of humor!
6. Terrorizing the doctors who would come and check on me.

After eight chemo treatments (along with a 2-week radiation treatment that made me very nauseous), it looks like I'm on the road back to health. Since my final treatment, I've shown no detectable signs of cancer for about 4 to 5 months. My immune system's working again and my hair is growing back curlier than before. Doctors don't consider you cured until you've been in remission for about 5 years. They've also warned me that the radiation and the chemo they used to cure me could also cause other types of cancer later. I could learn tomorrow that cancer is still lurking in my body. Or I could find out in 20 years that the chemo that cured my Hodgkin's has given me leukemia. I can't think about that now. I've got a long way to go, but I'm fighting.

Cancer is the pits, but it's also an amazing learning experience. While I know how cruel people can be, I've also seen incredible kindness, like the times total strangers opened up to me their own cancer ordeals. I know I can cope with a level of pain, embarrassment, and uncertainty I never imagined I'd be able to endure.

One night as I sat drenched in sweat after puking for the zillionth time, I rested my head on the toilet seat and thought, "No one would want to be me right now." Then I quickly corrected myself. "No, people who know they're not gonna make it, who are near the end, would want to be me." I thought about the other teens in the treatment room who weren't as lucky as I was, the faces that their parents would never see again. Life may be unfair, but it's death that really sucks.