Tag: lymphoma

Cancer Awareness Months

There are many different cancer awareness months with focused awareness on certain cancers. January is cervical cancer awareness month. February is Nation Cancer Prevention Month and Gallbladder and Bile Duct Cancer awareness month. March is Colorectal Cancer awareness month and Multiple Myeloma Awareness month. April is Esophageal, Head and Neck Cancer and Testicular Cancer Awareness month. May is National Cancer Research Month, May is also Bladder Cancer, Melanoma, Brain, and Skin Cancer Awareness month. June is National Cancer Survivor Month. July is Sarcoma and Bone Cancer Awareness month. August is Appendix Cancer Awareness month. September covers a lot of cancer awareness. It is Childhood Cancer, Leukemia, Lymphoma, Ovarian, Prostate, and Thyroid Cancer Awareness month. October is Breast and Liver Cancer Awareness month. November is Neuroendocrine Tumors, Gastric, Lung, and Pancreatic Cancer Awareness month. Somehow December is not any kind of cancer awareness month.

These are all well and good and should be acknowledged. As a two-time cancer warrior, I guess I would fall into the May and September category, having had lymphoma and brain cancer. Whenever I see postings about these months, I try to educate people and patients about the particular cancer that the month concentrates on. Still, I believe that there are so many additional unmentioned cancers that also deserve attention. I realize while saying this that it would be impossible to list them all. I get that. I guess what I am really trying to say is that cancer is something that we should remain vigilant for and attempt to screen for and diagnosis every single day, not just for a month or a day or a year.

As patient I realize that my particular battles and surveillance will never ever really be over for good. I will always have to be vigilant and follow up. This is why I even stay away from the word survivor because it implies a kind of finality that I don’t really think I have the luxury or confidence to truly embrace. That is ok. I am so happy just to still exist that the lifetime of surveillance does not trouble me. I plan to be in it for the long haul and whatever I have to do to help make that happen, I am in!

Digest these thoughts for a bit and have an amazing and grateful day!

Dr. Katz

Wow It has been 4 Months Since I’ve written!

My last post was actually in january 2024, fresh into the throws of my recent primary CNS Lymphoma diagnosis with a brain filled with tumor, mush, and swelling to the point of almost being unrecognizable as a brain by the time I had my brain surgery to get a cell sample. Fortunately, I was in the right place at the right time because I started crumpling like a piece of paper. It was like everything was spiraling out of control very fast. Suddenly I didn’t know my name or where i was or my birthdate. I just sadly shook my head at the neurosurgery check in lady. Thank goodness my husband was with me. He helped fill in the gaps. I underwent my brain surgery and slipped into an encephalopathic coma complete with seizure, swelling and the whole nine yards. My poor husband had to watch all this develop right before his eyes. He stayed with me the whole time I was in the coma, holding my hand, singing to me, trying to reach the me inside unconscious me any way he could. He didn’t give up! He kept telling everybody that they just didn’t understand. This was the fiercest, most beautiful brain they had ever seen and they had to save it!

Well, thank goodness we got there when we did. Once we started treating my seizures and started decreasing my swelling with steroids, voila I woke up days later! Awesome! However I am told that I was not exactly me but more of a smiling simpleton, picking at my brain surgery incisions. Oh for heaven sake. Things continued to improve in the icu and then I got to be transferred to rehab to relearn how to walk with balance properly ( Dang that brain is in charge of a lot).

Then after I finished rehab it was time to get a picc then a port placed and get the chemo started! This still didn’t happen until January but I was grateful it was happening at all. Now fast forward to May now. Weekly high intense chemo cycles for a total of 8 cycles, plus oral chemo. week in the hospital at a time. You see the particular chemo I was getting this time had to be cleared enough out of the body for me to go home without exposing somebody. Yikes.

Now the 8 cycles are over and my brain looks like a real brain again and I actually feel fully functional mental status wise but still get exhausted. I am so grateful just to be able to open my eyes in the morning. I was ready to be done with all this but the thing is, you are never really all the way done. I still have follow up to do for my first cancer and I always will but I am down with that! Let’s keep vigilant! Let’s keep paying attention. Let’s keep self-advocating.

The real truth of the matter is that I have had two totally different lymphomas in 3 years. That is not ok and a brisk pace to keep up. Would I keep doing it if I had to? Hell ya, I got too much to live for. But if there is an option out there that would possibly give me more time off cancer? Yes there is. This is the stem cell transplant I was talking about. First steps are shooting yourself full of granulocyte colony stimulating factors to make your lymph and bone marrow cells multiple like an army within! Thats a lot of hard work creating your own army. There are significant aches and pains involved, but I got through it. When the day came to retrieve the stem cells, I broke a record. The process was supposed to take like 8 hours and generate 3 or 4 million cells. Well it took me like 4 hours and I kicked out 11 million. They actually had to stop me early! WOW!

Now you take a few days off to rest and get admitted back to the hospital for cannon ball marrow ablating chemo for 8 straight days to zap you down to nothing. Rest again and put the health stem cells back. Let’s hope this works! I’ll let ya know.

Be well

Dr. Katz

I can’t believe I am doing this again.

Hi guys. Long time no write I realize. There has been a crap ton of stuff going on. I have cancer again, for the second time in three years. This time instead of Hodgkins, I have large b cell primary cns lymphoma. That means I have a monster brain tumor. Yuck. This means two different cell lines within three years. This means I have a stem cell issue and am probably looking at stem cell transplant on top of months of chemo. This mean months in the hospital away from my family and other people I Iove. To even say the words brain cancer out loud are terrifying. It’s the kind of thing that sends a little shudder of terror right to your heart. I can’t help it. it’s true. It’s a scary thing. I personally feel it shouldn’t happen to anybody…lol. It’s one of those things that I cannot spend a lot of time overthinking about. The fear could paralyze you if you let it. Life must go on somehow, no matter how much you have left. I realize that this one could finish me but I am not going to let it stop me from living now. I am going to do everything I can to stay for myself, my family, my friends and my patients. I am determined to make the most of my life. 

I am about to change direction and tell you what has been good about this diagnosis. I realize that that sounds ridiculous and counterintuitive, but just listen for a minute. The overflowing vast amount of support has been amazing and warms my heart. It reminds me of all the blessings I still have despite my diseased brain. My staff, friends, family and patients have been amazing and I could not be more grateful. It reminds me that I am a good person who has spread positivity and helpfulness into the world and now people are trying to give it back. No matter what happens, I will try never to forget that. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart. Stay positive and fierce people!

Dr. Katz

December 12th is coming and I’m freakin out!

Dec 12th…..Dec 12th 2020. It’s where it all started. The morning I woke up feeling like I was choking with a voice yelling inside my head to get up and look in the mirror. Whether it was my own gut instinct or my late father I will never now. That morning changed my life. I did get up. I did look into the mirror. I saw the lump on my neck and off I went. It was the beginning of a battle of fear, frustration, and anxiety as made my first steps toward my cancer revealing itself and everything that followed.

Well, that was almost two years ago. I thought I was getting better at letting it go. I really did but nope, here we are. It’s less than a month away and suddenly the panic attacks, the anxiety out of nowhere, the wondering about every little symptom is all back. It is PTSD at its best/worst. I can’t really believe how long it took me to figure it out. I guess I had to waste time beating myself up for having anxiety first. We all do. Then it hit me! Of course. The anniversary of one of the most traumatic times in my life is coming up! What normal brain can completely let that go? That trauma gets stored and buried, with significant effort from me. But, even I can’t hold it back all the time. Lord knows I try.

So, what do I do? I can’t keep fighting to suppress it. That will only keep me prisoner to it longer. I have to acknowledge it! I have to embrace that it is real and that it happened and that it affected me in ways that I still don’t fully process. I have to actualize my own feelings about it. The only way to be free is to go forward through it when the feelings flood me. The only power I have is the power to see it for what it is and decide how I want to proceed. The choice of direction is actually completely up to me. I could allow a day( or two or three) to break down and crumble. I could stop functioning. Or, I could move forward and use the experience for good. They say that the final stage of healing occurs when you are able to use what happened to you to help others. That is what I have chosen and continue to chose. I have written my books. I am giving my talks. I am helping other cancer patients. I help other people “get their mind right” for the battle ahead. I share knowledge every day to help give people some sense of control as to what is happening to them. These are the battles I chose to fight every day. These are the battles I want to win. I realize that my past trauma is still with me. I cannot change that, but I can chose to change what I do with it.

Dr. Katz

I just don’t know how to feel.

So, as I understand it, the end is near for my cancer treatments. This week is supposed to be the week. The last chemo. Wow. Just to say it out loud is really something. It doesn’t even seem real. Could it really be true? Of course, when I speak in terms of the end, it is not really the end. The next five years of my life are pretty well mapped out with follow ups and scans and appointments. It is really at the end of those five years that it is really “over,” not just at the end of chemo. There will always be that little forever shadow monkey on my back that things could take a turn for the ridiculous again.

I would be lying if I said that I am not excited about the prospect of chemo being over. But, weirdly, at the same time, I am a bit terrified as well. No more chemo?! While that means, hopefully, no more of the awful side effects after they all wear off. It also means no more internal liquid defense system. It also means that there could be more opportunities for the cancer to creep back into my life. Hmm. How will I know if it is coming back? In the interest of respecting the post traumatic stress aspect of being a survivor, I made a promise to myself not to panic at every little twinge or symptom that I experience after treatment is over, but should I? Or should I be hypervigilant? I don’t really know the right answer.

I am looking forward to feeling like myself again, to having stamina, to being able to exercise, to being able to have hair again (hopefully completely different and thick and amazing), and to feel, dare it say it, sexy again. But, I hear that that is going to be an additional wait as well. I have been told that it can take up to six months before patients feel back to baseline. This kind of statistic just makes me anxious because I suspect that it will be a natural tendency for everyone, including myself, to expect me to pick up right where I left off before treatment as far as work and life in general. I have a gift for putting extra pressure on myself and I am sure this will be no different. Well, at least I am consistent in that regard…lol

Basically what I am saying is that I am kind of all over the place right now. I have no idea how to feel. Part of me is ready to throw caution to the wind and literally have a party( socially distant of course) to celebrate the end of this chapter. The other part of me realizes that there is a whole lot of other stuff to consider before the party can begin.

Dr. Katz

It’s That Time Again

It’s that time again.

Time to draw my sword and open my vein

Disrupting Cancer’s evil reign.

Time for the battlements to flow

Freely to let lymphoma know

There is no place left to go.

No place left to hide so get ready.

My force to defeat you flows strong and steady.

Seeking you out in all your hiding places

Prepared to leave no tangible traces.

Our farewell will be long but not fond

For ours IS a breakable bond.

Dr. Katz, age 51

Today’s the Day!

The day has finally arrived, after multiple snafus, fits, and stops: the first chemo treatment! Hurray?! Is that the right response? I’m just not sure. All I know is that we showed up, I have my Star Wars shirt on, my port is accessed and drugs are flowing. Look out Hodgkins! It is on!. I am literally getting chemo right now. I can feel my eye fluttering like I am getting a migraine. I can feel my heart fluttering but I think that is just nerves. Of course, my long gone reflux resurfaced almost immediately. Weirdly, my hump on my neck started hurting almost right away. Maybe that means the drugs are already doing battle with my nodes!. Yess!…but owww at the same time!..lol

So let’s talk about chemotherapy for a minute. What the hell is it? Chemotherapy or chemo is a type of cancer treatment that involves giving multi anti cancer medications through an iv or port with the idea to try to cure the patient of cancer. It can also be given to prolong a patient’s life. It can also be given to reduce symptoms. (Palliative therapy).

There are three main kinds of chemo therapy: straight chemotherapy, hormone therapy, and targeted therapy. Now straight chemo is kind of old school. It aims at DNA damage or inhibiting replication by sending intracellular poisons right into the cancer cells..and unfortunately any other rapidly dividing cells like your stomach and hair.

Hormonal therapies, on the other hand are medicine with specific genetic and molecular targets that focuses on inhibiting growth of endocrine hormones like estrogen for breast cancer and andeogens foe prostate cancer.

Targeted therapy targets a different kind of growth inhibition. Targeted therapy is drugs that inhibit growth signals by inhibiting receptor tyrosine kinase at the cell surface.

Any of these three types of therapy are truly systemic therapy for cancer. This means that they are injected into the venous system and can therefore reach cancer anywhere in the body.

Because chemo is usually considered cytotoxic, it naturally affects dividing cells. The assumption is that the cancer cells will be dividing rapidly. While this is true, other cells in your body are also dividing rapidly in your bone marrow, your hair, your digestive tract. So, that explains the nausea, vomitting, hair loss, and low white blood cells and platelets. Side effects people! Yuck! But, I gotta tell ya, I will take them if it means getting rid of the cancer. Have a great day everybody!

Dr. Katz

Waiting for my PET scan

The big day is finally here. Pet scan day! What is a Pet scan you ask? A pet scan is a nuclear metabolic scan. Typical protocol goes something like this. You check in

They check your blood sugar to make sure it is below 200. Then they have you wait an hour to let the glucose spread through your body to your now starving cells. (You had to fast for this). Then yiu go through a machine that scans you from your head to your knees kind of like a CT scan, but more claustrophobic. The scan itself takes about 20 minutes. It looks for what’s called hot spots. These hit spots are areas of increased uptake of that glucose and increased metabolic activity. Since we know that cancer cells are rocking it out with devious metabolic workup more than your normal cells, those hot spots are likely to be areas of cancer. These results let you know at a cellular level where you are really starting from before you start chemo . It is usually a prerequisite to have a Pet scan before being able to participate in any clinical trials as well. Even though I have been waiting for this scan for what seems like forever, now that the day is here the reality of it is kind of hitting me like a ton of bricks. It didn’t help that I barely slept last night and woke up feeling 80 years old either. I am usually not the guest of honor at a pity party but oh man I almost threw one this morning….lol. Oh well. Time to put my party hat away. Time to dive in. I’ll let ya know how it turns out.

Dr. Katz

Takin it easy is not the same thing as being a prisoner.

Oh man am I having trouble with that distinction lately! First of all, limitations have never really been my jam to say the least. I have been a patient more than I care to admit in my lifetime. You know, multiple surgeries, medical emergencies, accidents, time off work, the whole nine yards. I am usually the one who is walking the halls just hours after emergency surgery. I am not a stay tied down kind of person. Now that the universe decided that cancer with chemo plus a pandemic was a good idea, I am looking at a whole lot more than just some temporary limitations. There is no way around it. I feel like I am looking at house arrest for months. Let’s face it, I will be immunosuppressed, on top of having cancer, in the midst of an ongoing pandemic. I can’t afford to take chances so I need to suck it up.

Yes, I exaggerated. I won’t exactly be on house arrest. I am going to work when I can. I will need to leave the house for doctor appointments. I just won’t be going out of my way to go out to dinner or take unnecessary risks. I probably won’t be doing any hospital procedures either. It’s just being smart. To be honest, it won’t be that different from what is going on now, except for the fact that the chemo I will be on shoves me from the mild risk category to the top of the highest risk category when it comes to death from infection and Covid. Yippee! This is not the kind of line that I wanted to cut to the front of.

In my rational moments, it all makes sense. There is no point in fighting hard to dodge the cancer bullet if I am just going to open myself up to the Covid one. That would be ridiculous. The restrictions are in place to help keep me safe and see this thing through to the end. I choose to follow them. I know that. And, it’s not as if there isn’t enough Netflix to go around to entertain me.

There are other things that I worry about though. Yes, believe it or not I worry about being bored, even though I am working on a book, a podcast, a blog and I try to post daily updates. I worry about having too much time to think which runs the risk of being counterproductive and focused on worrying with nothing to distract me. I worry about resenting my family and friends as the pandemic restrictions lift and life resumes again while I watch vicariously through a proverbial window. I worry about being consumed with guilt from letting people down. I realize that everyone is being tremendously understanding now, but everybody has their limits. See! I wouldn’t have so much time to overthink all of this unless I was on restrictions!…lol

Oh who am I kidding? No one really has to enforce my restrictions. My body takes care of that nicely. I never know which version of me is going to lift her head off the pillow in the morning: the one that is raring to go for several hours or the one that gets short of breath after about three steps and has to sit back down. It is a real Wheel of Fortune going on around here and I am definitely not the big winner the majority of the time. I am kidding myself to think that I could really change that even if I wanted to right now. It is what it is. The only real choice that I get to have control over is my attitude and my willingness to accept the advice of my doctors. I have to realize that this is not their first rodeo and that they do actually know what’s best based on experience, knowledge, and training. Like I am always saying, I need to be a team player in my healthcare. If coach says I need to sit on the bench for a bit, well then I better just sit.

Dr. Katz

The Best 35 Minutes Ever!

So, this one Saturday pre chemo I woke up feeling like a champ!  I had slept a full ten hours…..without interruption!  Holy Crap!  I didn’t even feel like I had cancer!  I had energy!  I wanted to go kick some ass somewhere!  I did a little dance.  I told everybody in the house that I was ready to go.  I sat down to breakfast 35 minutes later, smiling ear to ear.  And then, without warning, it all started melting away.  I felt the slow spread of heat and fatigue wash over me.  I started getting short of breath and achy.  I couldn’t speak in full sentences without taking a breath.  Within a few minutes, my cancer symptoms had swept back in, enveloping me in that blanket of sick that I had just swore I had shucked off for the day.  Here I was again, the lymphoma patient, set up for yet another day on the couch.  Awe man!  One of the hardest parts too is watching my husband’s temporarily hopeful facial expression slowly fade into a sad little empathetic smile that I have come to know so frequently.  This is, my friends, just the way it is.  There is a level of unpredictability about this whole thing that is never easy to reconcile, much less accept.  Welp, I guess it’s time to dig out the remote again and settle in for some more Netflix. It is what it is. That’s fine. I’ll rest for now, plotting what amazing things I could do in that next 35 minutes! This is just one of the smaller battles Cancer. You can have this one. I’m saving myself for the real one. Cue mic drop.

Dr. Katz