Ron Skoronksi: Welcome to Forward Lymphoma

Hi, I’m Ron Skoronski, and welcome to Forward Lymphoma. The purpose of Forward Lymphoma is to fund innovative research at the University of Wisconsin. Your donations will be used to improve the quality of life for lymphoma patients. I’m a 47 year old retired businessman from Wisconsin. I was recently diagnosed with Non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. It was, I’m sure like most cancer patients it’s to borrow a war term, it’s the shock and awe feeling, it’s, this isn’t happening to me. It’s a very surreal thing that you know, what’s next? You associate cancer with death, how long am I going to live? What’s the treatment? Am I going to lose my hair? What do I say? To who? How is it going to affect my family and my life? I mean it’s literally a flood of feelings, emotions. What do I say? What do I do next? After my diagnosis I turned to my close family, my Mom & Dad, my brothers & sister, and Googled the internet for information, trying to find more information on Follicular Lymphoma, what were the options, where could I go, what could I do to hopefully cure myself, what were the survival rates, what was my outcome, what was I facing down the road? I found out Follicular Lymphoma was not curable, but it was treatable, that the survival rates and the charts on the internet were not as positive as I hoped, but that there is hope, that there is a lot of people that suffer from Lymphoma. When you hear lymphoma, a lot of people are puzzled on what that is, its not as well known as some of the other cancers, and it’s a terrible disease really, that needs attention.