Well, the oncologist was great. It was really frightening, though, wondering how I was going to pay for everything without any insurance. I'm completely on my own financially with no family able to help me out at all with expenses.

Things moved really quickly at the oncologist's office. He did a brief physical exam, felt millions of swollen lymph nodes, ascertained that I was having nightsweats, rash, bloody noses, slow to heal, probably most of the seven major warning signs of cancer. I had never really thought about having cancer. No one in either side of my family had any cancer that I knew of and I really didn't consider myself much of a risk for anything. Shoot, I've never even tried to smoke (both of my parents were chain smokers while I was growing up, though),

After the constant barrage of questions, they hooked me up to an IV and then did a bone marrow test to make sure that the Hodgkin's had not gotten that far yet. A bone marrow test is odd. It's not quite as scary as people make it out to be, at least it wasn't for me. The doctor gave me medicine to make me loopy, then flipped me over to take the bone marrow from my hips. He made an incision on each side and inserted some long probe-needle thing that I'm glad I couldn't see. I could feel that something was happening, but I couldn't really feel anything. I could tell that he was scraping the inside of my bone and that it was taking a great deal of effort. The second one, however, I could feel more. That was a wee bit uncomfortable. It hurt, not excruciatingly so, but I could tell that he was scraping the inside of my bone.

When that was over, I was asked which hospital I wanted.

I wasn't really prepared for that question. We decided on a hospital and then he was telling me that the biopsy would be just as soon as he could schedule it -- sometime that day. I wanted to go home and pack up a few things first. He frowned and told me to be there in under an hour. Yikes! After only seeing me once, this man was throwing me in the hospital. A few hours later I was having a lymph node removed from my left armpit (you really wanted to know that, didn't you? When you have all of these medical procedures done, these things actually become important and interesting to you). By that evening, I was in the hospital, recovered from the minor biopsy surgery and getting a much needed blood transfusion. It took a shot of something called Procrit (I think) and FIVE units of blood before my hemoglobin was anywhere near normal again. I had been anemic for months and not realized it.

A very nice nurse brought me a cafeteria sandwich, turkey, but I still wasn't too interested in food since my bout with thrush over the summer. All I could really think of was that I was in the hospital for the first time in my life. I had no health insurance and very little money. I had put myself through school, undergraduate and graduate school. I had moved 1000 miles from my hometown. I had debt and now I was about to have a lot more. A lot. The possibility that I was seriously ill really hadn't hit me yet. We didn't even quite know what I had just yet. Probably a lymphoma, but we didn't know what kind. It sounded like I probably had a low-grade lymphoma, which is not good and probably meant that I had a few months (or maybe weeks) to live. We had to wait for the biopsy results to know.

The next morning was Thanksgiving 1999.

Next, the diagnosis and the start of chemo >