Me too, I'm new!

Hello! I'm Sarah. I'm 24, I live in SC and I have a beautiful 3 year old little boy. When I was 23 I was diagnosed with Stage 4 A&B Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I had been sick with flu like symptoms on and off for over a year and about 3 or 4 months before I was diagnosed, (which was in June of 2008) I started to have really bad back pain. I've never really been one to run to the doctor everytime I don't feel well. 2 or 3 times I went with those flu like symptoms (fever, chills, nausea, achy body, sweats) I was given nausea medicine and told to rest. Because of being sick all the time and thinking it was the flu which is contagious, I missed a lot of work and was eventually fired in Nov. 07 (I worked at a home for the mentally and physically challanged. I couldn't go to work for fear of getting them sick) This back pain was starting to become dibilitating. I couldn't sit or stand longer than 10 minutes without being doubled over in pain and if I stood in 1 spot for too long my legs started shaking, went numb, and gave out and I would fall over. I went to the doctor and asked for an MRI. He called me about 4 or 5 day's later with the results and I was expecting him to say that I had a herniated disk or pinched nerve, instead I heard "There are spots on your spine. I think it may be cancer. Come in for blood work and I'm going to schedule a CAT scan." I cried I know for at least 24 hours non stop. My CAT scan was scheduled for the next day. A week or so later I get a call "There are quite a few lymphnodes that are enlarged and your spleen is also enlarged. It sounds like Lymphoma, but I won't know if it's Hodgkin's or non-hodgin's until you have a bone marrow byopsey" By this time I'm completly freaked out, but it took him 2 1/2 weeks to schedule a non-surgical bone marrow aspiration (which was so painful by the way) and 6 day's later he calls, "The results are incunclusive, I'm scheduling a surgical bone marrow biopsey" Now, I have already waited long enough from when I heard "there are spots on your spine" and Ive been sick for over a year...he schedules the surgery for a month later!! By this time I've had enough! My mom is a home hospice nurse and she had had enough too. She wrote a letter to Dr. Vician, an Oncoligist who took care of a lot of her patients, and explained the situation to her and asked if she would see me. The office called and asked me to come in for a bunch of tests a few day's later. It was a Wednesday I went in and had blood work and a bone scan done and when I was leaving after the bone scan they told me to go back down to her office because she was going to admit me. My blood work was so off the wall she didn't know what to make of it, she couldn't believe it. She scheduled for me to have my spleen removed that Friday and have it byopseyed and to also have the surgeon pluck some lymphnodes and biopsey them. It turns out I had 2 spleens!! It's weird, I know, but so am I!! The next week I got the new's I had been dreading to hear, the results were in and i had Hodgkin's Lymphoma. I began Chemo 2 weeks after I left the hospital. June 13th (Friday the 13th) was my 1st treatment. I was getting ABVD. When they finally did a PET scan I couldn't believe how advanced it was. When you looked at the immage, everything from my neck to my thighs was shaded in black completly! the only white spot on the scan where there wasn't any cancer was where my spleen was. It was so advanced it had spread to my bones. I had it in my bones in a few places including my spine, and I also had 4 tumors growing on my spine I've had a grand total of 14 treatments and I can happily say now that it is in remission. My Oncologist told me "In the 37 years I've been working with cancer patients I have NEVER seen a case as bad as yours. I was almost scared to treat you, I wanted to send you to a specialist in Nebraska. But I promised you from the beginning I would never give up as long as you never give up." She truely is the best. I owe that women everything. I could go on and on about her but I'm going to end this now because it's pretty long and I'm lookin forward to reading other members stories. I hope I didn't bore anyone too bad! Thanks for readin!!