Hi! I'm Kat. I'm an elementary education major at a state university on the Front Range of Colorado (four hours over the mountains from home, which is Grand Junction, which is the best town in Colorado, don't argue with me). I want to teach first grade. I have a thing for tiny chairs.

Last October, in the middle of sophomore year, I found a lump in my neck. It turned out to be Hodgkin's disease, which is a kind of cancer (yes, I'm going to keep saying the word, it's just a word, it only has as much power as you give it, says my mom, who then went in the bathroom and cried, so). I took a medical leave, went home, did twelve chemo treatments and a month of radiation, and in August my scans came back CLEAR. I'm back on campus this fall in remission, living in the dorms again, wearing a lot of hats, and trying to remember how to take notes.

I made this page because when I was diagnosed I looked everywhere for something by a girl my age and found mostly pamphlets with pictures of sad older people looking out windows. So here's mine. With jokes. (Some of the jokes are bad. I was on a lot of anti-nausea medicine when I wrote them.)

Important: I'm a college junior, not an oncologist. (I'm technically a junior. Long story involving AP credits and two incompletes I finished by mail. It counts.) Everything here is just my experience. Ask your own doctor about your own body!

The Lump

It was a Friday night in October and I was putting on a necklace for a party and my fingers bumped into something above my left collarbone. A lump. About the size of a grape. It didn't hurt at all. I figured it was a swollen gland from the cold everybody on my floor had, and I went to the party, and I forgot about it.

Two weeks later it was still there, and my roommate Jaime (who is the best human ever, more on her later) basically marched me to student health. The nurse practitioner felt it, frowned in that way medical people try not to frown, and sent me for a chest X-ray. The X-ray showed more swollen lymph nodes in the middle of my chest. Then there was a surgeon, who took out the lump in my neck so they could look at it under a microscope (that's the biopsy; I was asleep; I woke up starving and demanding pudding), and then there was a phone call, and my parents drove over the mountains that same night.

Then came staging, which is how they figure out how far it's spread. For me that was CT scans (you drink a big cup of chalky stuff that they flavor "berry," which is a lie), lots of blood tests, and a bone marrow biopsy, which I'm just going to say was not my favorite afternoon and leave it there. Ask for the good drugs.

The result: Stage IIA. Here's what that means, in English.

Hodgkin's 101

Chemo and Radiation

My treatment was ABVD chemo, which is four drugs whose names I can now spell in my sleep (Adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine, take THAT, spelling bee). You get it in cycles. Each cycle is two treatments, two weeks apart. I had six cycles, so twelve treatments, every other Tuesday from November to April, at the cancer center in Grand Junction. Then about a month of radiation, every weekday, in May and June.

A chemo day: blood test first, to check your counts. Then they hook you up. I had a port, a little disk under the skin below my collarbone (the other side from the lump) that they put the needle into so they don't have to find a new vein every time. I named it Porter. Then anti-nausea medicine, then the four drugs through the IV, which took a few hours. One of them is bright red like fruit punch. (You will find out why I'm telling you that the first time you go to the bathroom afterward. Don't panic. It's normal.) I watched a movie every time. The list is on The Countdown.

How it felt: The day of and the day after were the worst: queasy, tired, everything tasting like I'd been sucking on a penny. The anti-nausea medicines they have now are really good, and if yours isn't working, TELL THEM, because there are others. Then I'd get a little better each day until the next one. By the end I was tired all the time, like jet lag that lasts five months. My blood counts went low sometimes, which means you catch things easily, so I stayed away from crowds and anybody with a sniffle, and my whole family became hand-washing fanatics.

Because of some of the drugs, they also checked my heart and my lungs with tests before and during treatment. That's normal too. Ask your doctor what they're watching for.

Radiation: First they mark you with a few tiny tattoo dots (the size of a freckle) so they aim at the exact same spot every day. I have four. I tell people they're constellations. The radiation itself doesn't hurt and only takes a few minutes. You lie very still while a big machine hums at you. Then you go home. By the end my throat was sore and the skin on my neck looked sunburned, and I was tired again, and then it all faded.

August: CT and gallium scans. Clear. CLEAR! My mom screamed in the hallway of the hospital. A nurse came running. Now I go back for checkups every few months, and I will be the most checked-up person you know for a long time, and I am fine with that.

Telling Your Roommate and Your Professors

Your roommate: Tell her. Tell her the real word and tell her what you need. Jaime was the first person I told after my parents, on the phone, and she said, "Okay. What do I do?" which is honestly the best thing anybody can say. She packed up my half of the room for me, sent me a care package every single week (every week! for six months!), and drove four hours over the mountains on her winter break to sit with me at chemo. Let your roommate be scared too. Mine cried in the stairwell and I found out later. She's allowed.

Your professors: The best thing I did was go to the Dean of Students office first. They sent a letter to all my professors at once, so I didn't have to explain it five times. Then I went to office hours and talked to each of them. Every single one was kind. Two let me take an incomplete and finish the work from home. My ed psych professor sent me a get-well card signed by the whole class, which made me ugly-cry in my mom's kitchen.

Coming back: If you're still tired or have trouble with stuff when you come back, go see your school's disability services office. You might be able to get extra time on tests, a note-taker, or a lighter load without losing your status. I didn't know that office was for people like me. It is.

Medical Leave and Money Stuff

Nobody tells you about this part, and it's important, so I'm putting it in a box.

Hair (RIP) and the Hat Collection

They told me I'd probably lose my hair two or three weeks after the first treatment, and right on schedule, the week of Thanksgiving, it started coming out on my pillow. So I had my dad shave it all off with his clippers in the garage before it could fall out in clumps. My little brother Joel, who is seventeen and whose hair was his whole personality, shaved his too. I didn't ask him to. I'll never forget that as long as I live. Don't tell him I said that.

I tried a wig. It was itchy and hot and it made me look like a news anchor. So I went with baseball caps. People started giving them to me. By the end of chemo I had thirty-one. The Rockies. The Avalanche. The Broncos (I wore it to treatment #7, two days after the Super Bowl, and the nurses cheered). A pink one from Jaime with a daisy on it. A Grand Junction feed store. One from a bait shop in Wyoming that my grandma found somewhere and refused to explain.

The American Cancer Society has a class where they teach women going through treatment how to do makeup, including how to draw on eyebrows when yours fall out. Go. I went with my mom. We laughed so hard. Also I now have great eyebrows, even though my real ones came back.

Hair update, September 1999: It's back! It's about two inches long and (surprise!) CURLY, which it has never been in my life. My mom says lots of people's hair comes back different. I look like a poodle. I love it.

Ask First: Fertility

This is serious so I'm going to be un-jokey for one paragraph.

Before your first treatment, ask your oncologist how your treatment might affect your ability to have children someday. Some chemo drugs and some radiation can affect fertility, and some treatments are harder on it than others. Dr. Camacho told me the treatment I was getting is considered easier on fertility than some of the older combinations, which was a relief, but I only knew that because I asked. Guys can bank sperm before treatment starts. For women the options are fewer, but there are still questions to ask, especially if radiation will be anywhere near your pelvis. Things move fast after a diagnosis and nobody may bring it up. Bring it up. I'm going to be a first grade teacher and I want a house full of kids someday, and I'm glad I asked when there was still time to ask.

Okay. Jokes resume.

For Friends: What Actually Helped

• Mail. Real mail. Cards, letters, mix tapes, a box of glitter pens, a Polaroid of my empty half of the dorm room with a sign that said "RESERVED FOR KAT." Getting mail when you're stuck at home is the best.
• E-mail every day. Even three lines. Even just "nothing happened today, Psych was boring." I needed to know normal life was still happening.
• Talking about normal stuff. Who's dating who. Who got caught with a toaster in the dorm. I did not need every conversation to be about cancer.
• Rides. My whole family and half my church drove me to chemo. Every name is on The Countdown.
• Food I could stand. Not a casserole. A box of saltines and a two-liter of ginger ale is a love letter.
• Not disappearing. Some people did. That's okay, people get scared. But the ones who stayed, I will love forever.

What didn't help (with love): stories about your aunt who had cancer (unless your aunt is fine and now runs marathons, in which case PLEASE tell me). "Everything happens for a reason." Calling me brave. I wasn't brave. I just didn't have a choice, and I showed up every other Tuesday.

Good People to Know

The American Cancer Society. Information about every kind of cancer in plain English, and local offices with programs like the makeup class. They were great to my mom, who had a lot of questions at 2 a.m.

The Leukemia Society of America. Don't let the name fool you: they help people with lymphomas too, including Hodgkin's. They have information for patients and families and can help you find support near you.

Your oncology nurses. They know everything. Ask them the stuff you're embarrassed to ask the doctor.

Me! If you're 19 or 20 or 25 and you just got told the word, and you want to talk to somebody who's been there, write me. I mean it. I write back.