My name is Antonia and ab
out two years ago my story began with Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
It all started slowly, without realizing it. I started feeling out of shape in November 2017, I did some blood tests but nothing particular had emerged except low hemoglobin. Without giving it too much weight, I repeated the blood tests after a few months but the hemoglobin not only hadn’t improved but, on the contrary, it had dropped and I began to feel more and more tired, fatigued, I lost 3 kg in a month, it was clear that I was wasting myself. I thought it was all stress, I have three children, I work and I like to have everything under control so I thought maybe I was doing too much, but it wasn’t like that. Unfortunately, at the same time, at that time I had to undergo surgery, I was convinced to stay in the hospital for a couple of days and then go home, but it wasn’t like that. The surgeon who operated on me said he would investigate to find out what was wrong.
I was in a hospital, far from home, and there was only my husband with me, night and day next to me. Within 5 days the doctors performed gastroscopy, colonoscopy, total body CT scan with contrast, various ultrasound scans, and there they were all my swollen lymph nodes in my abdomen, I was full.
I meet the hematologist, I still hadn’t understood anything, it was he who explained to me that the clinical picture suggested it was a lymphoma. I didn’t know what Hodgkin’s lymphoma was, I didn’t even know it existed, I had heard of other cancers, but not of this one. After this week I go home, my family is all around me and I begin to feel really bad, the fever begins, a fever that practically never leaves me, how much I hated that fever, it exhausted me, it knocked me down.
My definitive diagnosis of stage II type B Hodgkin’s lymphoma arrives.
When they tell you that you have a tumor, your life changes in an instant, everything is reversed, everything has another perspective. I tried to face all my illness with a smile, during chemo I never showed myself down, my children, my husband, my mom, my sister, my uncles, my cousins and my best friends were close to me and they suffered with me never leaving me. I always thought in the darkest days, “tomorrow will be better than today, the day after tomorrow I’ll be better, in three days the pain will pass”. And the months have passed. My 3 children were wonderful, they were always close to me, my older daughters aged 17 and 14 helped me in everything, they took care of their mother, the boy instead of 7 held my hand, caressed me and she flattered me, she always told me that I was the most beautiful mother even without hair. You carry all the obvious signs of care on you, from losing your hair, to occasionally having memory lapses, skin blemishes. It hasn’t been easy to deal with everything, and it’s not easy to talk about it now. Everyone tells me that I was strong and determined to win my battle, but no one knows how much we still suffer. Not a physical suffering, no, it is seeing life from a different perspective, you are happy to have won but you have been hurt and that wound is difficult to mend.
I have to thank the whole hematology department of the San Carlo hospital in Potenza and in particular Dr. Cimminiello who immediately became my point of reference, always available and ready to give me support. I was treated with a protocol from the Italian Lymphoma Foundation, the message I want to share with everyone is that scientific research is important and realities like FIL work hard to give patients like me new treatment possibilities.
Antonia