CureHodgkins.com Patient Diary
YODFAT GLAZER - STAGE IIIB HODGKIN'S LYMPHOMA

My name is Yodfat Glazer, and I am going to be 19 next month. I'm originally Israeli, but have lived in Guatemala for the last 9 years. When I was turning 14, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma, stage IIIB. It started out with intense headaches, an awful cough, and a fever that wouldn't disappear for weeks. It was October '92 and finals were due. My pediatrician told my parents that it would be best to wait until finals were over and then to admit me to the hospital for thorough tests. In one week I had two biopsies done. The first one didn't reveal much, and the second provoked a suspicion of cancer. The day after my checking out from the hospital was my 14th birthday. I got a puppy.

My parents did not want to tell me about me maybe having cancer; not until they got a second opinion. I was simply told that the doctors were uncertain about what I had. We traveled to Houston (Texas Children's Hospital). My biopsy was sent there. While a doctor was checking me, he was talking to my parents. I wasn't really listening until he said something that caught my attention. Something like, "..so we'll see if it's that or it isn't that.." After he left the room I asked my mother Mom, what did he mean by "that"? She said he meant cancer.

By that time I hadn't the least idea about what cancer was. I knew some people lost their hair, but figured that probably some types of cancer made your hair fall, while others don't. But it got me a bit worried. I still wasn't thinking of the chemotherapy. After cancer was confirmed, we had a meeting with the doctor. He asked me if there were any questions, and I said, "Yes, would my hair fall?" He told me it probably will. I started to cry.

I began chemotherapy in November. I had six months of it, and after that we went to Israel for a second opinion of how to proceed with the treatment. I was told to have 2 more months of chemotherapy, and three months after, to go back and have another gallium scan. The gallium scan in december reavled a bit of tumor still in the chest. So I went through another month of radiotherapy in Israel. That sure beat it.

It's been 5 years since the begining of treatment and I'm doing great. I'm very much afraid of the cancer coming back. I'm pretty much afraid of any serious illneses, of hospitals and medicine. Throughout my treatment I think I was much more optimistic than I am now. Kind of like the cancer sucked out all of my strength; but surely I had just enough to beat it. It was almost as hard to end the treatment, as it was to begin it, since all my concentration, all of my goals, were focused on it. But the future looks bright, and I regained hope.

PART II:  Looking Back
W R I T T E N   J U N E   2 1,   2 0 0 0

Twice in my life I had the feeling I was going to die.

The first time was returning from Houston after cancer had just been confirmed. By then I was 15 pounds lighter, pale, confused. I really didn't know what to think. I must admit that, back at Houston, the thought of such an important disease even... well it excited me a bit. I wasn't sad at first. I didn't know what to expect. I don't remember how long we were in Houston before returning to Guatemala to initiate treatment, but it was long enough for me to start believing I was going to die. It's funny, I didn't "wonder" about it, I simply "accepted" it. It didn't scare me, but I started feeling sad. The only word I can find to describe how the thought of dying made me feel is "black". Everything turned black; I was going to die.

Then one evening I was lying on my parents' bed, my mom was reading a book or something and I asked her: am I going to die? What a question... Mom, am I going to die? She said "Of course not!" That surprised me. I believed her.

The second time was a few months into the treatment. One evening I felt my hands really hot. I felt them burning. It turned out I had a temperature of 104 degrees. My parents were hysterical. I was told to get into a tub of cool water and that's when I started thinking I was going to die. The song "Forever Young" was pretty popular those days, and I couldn't get it out of my head: "Let's just die young or let's just live forever"... I was annoyed with myself for singing it in my head, you know, when you get obsessed with a song and no matter how hard you try, you're "singing" it in your thoughts. Anyway, after being in the water for a while I got dressed and went downstairs. My parents were speaking with a professor who had attended me in Israel and he was saying to them (or at least that's what they told me) to not worry, that these things happened in cancer treatments, and that they should take me to the hospital right away. So off we went. My mom's car is a van and I usually sit sideways looking out the back window. I remember this so well. Seeing the deserted road that night and thinking to myself that I will never see it again. I thought I was going to die and I felt really sad. Again, I wasn't scared, I was just very sad.

After arriving at the emergency room, and I had a blood cell count, and found out my white blood cells had dropped to 100 (I think I was told normal is between 8,000 and 16,000). That meant that a simple flu could kill me. So I was put in a private room where only family was allowed to enter and I stayed there for about a week. For three days I was injected something under my skin that elevated the amount of white blood cells in my body, then I got better and went home.

But nothing can be compared with the loss of hair. You have to understand, I was fourteen. You're so insecure about your looks at that age. I was clearly obsessed with hair. I remember I would dream every night, every single night, that I had my hair back, and it was long and pretty. My dreams seemed so real, I remember them to this day. When I began treatment, I thought to myself: this is simple, all I have to do is a ponytail. I won't brush my hair, I won't wash it, I won't touch it, and it would fall down and grow back again before I know it. Yea right. One day I decided I'll wash it anyway, just this once. I undid the ponytail, entered the shower and surprise: my hair was made into one big knot. It seems the hair that had already began falling tangled up with the rest of my hair. I began getting nervous, tried putting on hair conditioner, and when that didn't work I became hysterical. I got out, put on a towel, went downstairs and started shouting. It took my parents a while to understand me, and finally called over a hairstylist to cut my hair short. I remember this so well: she was cutting my hair and so much of it was falling off.

When she done, I stood up and walked over to the bathroom mirror. I looked up and saw something I would never forget: My hair was short for the first time in my life, and yet the worst part were the spaces where there was no hair. After that, it took a week for every single hair to fall down. Only a week. I would go to sleep and, in the morning, the towel I had put under my head would be full of hair. For a long time during the treatment I stopped looking at mirrors. I remember entering the bathroom and walking past the mirror so very careful not to look at it. Then one day, an accident occurred: I looked. And I couldn't stop looking, and I couldn't stop crying.

I also remember the first time I was made fun of. It was one of the first times I left home after treatment had begun. I only walked a few blocks to the drug store to buy a chocolate or something, and some kids started laughing at the fact that I wore a scarf with nothing underneath. I was so hurt, and I went home and I'm not sure if I called my mom on the phone or she called me, but I remember I started crying and I told her I didn't care what happened but I was not going to go along with the treatment. Anyway, she told me something like this is my life we're talking about and the fact that some kids can't understand that isn't at all important. 

PART III:  Update 2000
W R I T T E N   J U N E   2 1,   2 0 0 0

I'm living in Mexico nowadays, and cancer is pretty much in the past now. Most of my friends know I had it, but we never really talk about it much. It scarcely ever gets mentioned unless someone asks me why I have a scar at the bottom of my neck (actually I have two scars, but the second one hardly shows). Or unless I'm asked why my hair was curly and short back when I was 16 (when my hair started growing it was so very curly, I loved it, but about a couple of years later it want back to its usual wavy self). Sometimes I do feel the need to talk about it, but I think people don't feel very comfortable with it, or they're scared they might make you uncomfortable if they ask you questions. So I don't talk about it, but I think of it a lot from time to time.

Hodgkin's and everything it brought along is an inseparable part of me. It's weird see, I'm studying Psychology and thus trying to make sense of my past. But I can't figure out what effects the treatment alone brought about. Some things are obvious, I'm terrified of getting sick, I can't stand hospitals and the smell of pure alcohol, I can't stand seeing needles penetrate the skin.

Cancer is part of who I am, and I love who I am. I don't think I'd be able to go through it again, and that terrifies me, but it's an extremely important part of me and I would never give it up. I think a lot about the meaning of life. I've had three "life crisis" where I questioned the meaning of absolutely everything, the sense of living, laughing, loving, everything. I think those were strongly related to the fact that after treatment everything suddenly seemed so senseless, everything was so much less important then surviving: After surviving is over and done with, you think: So what's next?

After treatment was almost just as difficult as the treatment itself, emotionally speaking. During treatment I was just so optimistic, I used to write a diary, and I started doing weird things like drawing on my T-shirts and cutting them up, I started writing poems, I stopped believing in God. I remember the last pill I took. I celebrated it with me, myself, and my diary.

I think there are two basic things that characterized my life after treatment: I started fearing getting sick, and I started feeling everything in my life was senseless. It was tough because I had no one I felt I could really talk to. A short while later I left home, at 17, and that's when I slowly began regaining what you might call the "joy of living". I've met some really wonderful people along the way to whom I owe a lot. For a few years after the disease I would cry if I'd see or think of anything that reminded me of the treatment: hospital letters, the remaining pills, the wig I was bought and never ever used. But today the chapter is pretty much over. Some things still touch me (like reading my own story on the Internet again after 3 years), but in general today I can think about it and talk about it in a more "objective" way, perhaps as though it had happened to somebody else.

1997, 2000 Yodfat Glazer. Rights Reserved.