Inspirational Stories

I want to start off by saying that my husband is amazing. My father passed away suddenly in September 2023, and my husband was my rock. He does/did everything he could to help me through my grief and still does. My husband had been complaining that he felt like something was stuck in his throat, but he would clear his throat, and it would go away. The week before Thanksgiving 2023, my husband was watching a funny video on YouTube and laughed so hard he couldn't catch his breath. He leaned forward trying to catch his breath but cut off his airway and collapsed face forward onto the floor. He popped right up five seconds later and didn't know what had happened. I was hysterical, and considering I had just lost my father to heart problems two months prior, I thought my husband had just had a heart attack. He assured me he was fine, and he acted fine, so we let it go. A couple of nights later, I woke up to Andres on top of me making a choking sound. Again, he popped up, said he was asleep (in Spanish, lol), and got up to use the bathroom. He made it to the doorway of the bathroom and collapsed. This time I called 911. Because of the fall earlier in the week, Andres had two black eyes, so the paramedics were concerned he broke a bone in his face, and it hadn't healed properly. When we got to the ER, we told the doctor what happened, and Andres also told her that he still felt like something was stuck in his throat. They did a CT scan of his head and didn't find any broken bones. The doctor ordered another CT scan of Andres's chest and body. When she came back, that's when she told us, "There's a mass about 11 centimeters in your chest, and it looks like lymphoma." We were devastated. 

From there we were transferred to another local hospital where we saw a cardiothoracic surgeon. Because the mass was close to Andres' heart and lungs, the surgeon had to do a surgery called VATS where they go in through the ribs and take a biopsy of the mass. Andres had a chest tube in for three days. The morning after the tube came out, his lung collapsed by 40%, and they had to put another chest tube in to reinflate his lung. We stayed in the hospital for a total of eight days. The biopsy of the mass came back normal. The surgeon told us a PET scan would be the next best thing to do since the biopsy results didn't tell us anything. The results from the PET scan showed the mass and that his lymph nodes were enlarged. At the time my husband was overweight, so we could not see or feel that he had enlarged lymph nodes. While in the hospital and because he could not eat solid foods due to the mass blocking his airway, he lost 50 pounds. The next surgery was a biopsy of his lymph nodes. Since the results came back inconclusive, the surgeon sent them off to another lab, and we had to wait for those results. Three days later, we got the call confirming what the ER doctor had said from the beginning: stage 2 Hodgkin lymphoma HL). A third surgery was scheduled to put in a port so Andres could begin chemotreatment asap. 

It's been a long, hard journey, but the medical team we have had, the nursing staff at the Gibbs Cancer Center in Greer, South Carolina, family and friends, plus the help provided through The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS) has made this journey bearable. What we have learned from this experience is that you have to keep fighting. Keep fighting for your family, and your friends; keep fighting for yourself. There's a song called Swim by Jack's Mannequin, and towards the end of the song, he says, "You gotta swim, swim in the dark. There's no shame in drifting, feel the tide shifting and wait for the spark. You gotta swim, don't let yourself sink. Just find the horizon. I promise you, it's not as far as you think. Just keep your head above, swim." So that's my advice to everyone. Just keep your head above and swim.