Mary Sage: My Experience

My name is Mary Sage and I’m 65 years old. In 1995 I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. At the time I was about 52 years old and had 5 children living, 2 of my sons were married and my oldest son had a child, had 1 grandchild at the time, and my daughter was recently engaged, I had a son in high school and a son in grade school, only in 4th grade. So it was very important for me to go through the treatments and get well as quickly as I could because I had a lot of living to do. I’ve been in remission now for 13 years; I went through the chemotherapy for about 6 months in 1995, after a month’s rest I went through about a month of radiation treatments and since that time I’ve been cancer free. Back in, around Christmas time of 1994, I noticed that I had 1 area on my neck that was a little bit more full then the other, there was not really a lump but sort of a fullness there, and so I went in to my primary care doctor and had a physical and mentioned that and he said well we aught to check into it. So he ordered a sonogram and I had that area checked out. So, my primary care doctor then ordered a biopsy of the area and they did the biopsy and then 2 days later they had me come in and they said it definitely was Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and that he would let us know what our options were, because there were several different things they could do for treatment. So I had about 6 months worth of chemotherapy and then about 6 weeks I think of radiation after that.