Ruth was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Disease at the age of 37. She set out to become a cancer survivor from the beginning, and three years out, she's living out her dream.
Ruth's Story
"They thought I had pneumonia."
I got bronchitis and I went to the doctor and it was bad enough that they thought I had pneumonia and they took a chest x-ray. When we got the x-ray back, the nurse practitioner said, "You have a mass on your lungs." I walked out of there that day thinking that I had lung cancer. Two days later I went in for a cat scan, and at that point it was determined to be Hodgkin's Lymphoma, a blood cancer.
"I looked in the mirror and saw a completely healthy 37-year-old female."
One of the strangest things was something I call visual health. There was nothing on the outside that was telling anyone that I was sick. I am looking in the mirror, I am perfectly healthy, I think I am fine, and all of a sudden I am being told that I am deathly ill and I am going to lose all my hair and that this chemo that I am going to go through is going to tell the world that I am sick. I am not going to be able to hide it because of what it does it to you, you don't have any choice, you lose weight, you turn yellow, you lose all your hair. I was pretty arrogant about the fact that I was going to beat this thing.
"I did not know about the post traumatic stress associated with cancer."
I had a Hodgkin's cocktail of four different drugs, three of which they push through a syringe, one which is so toxic that they had to be covered from head to toe with goggles and everything. Three of the drugs went pretty quickly, but the fourth drug is so hard on your veins that they have to dilute it with saline because if they put it straight in it would eat at your veins. The second they inject you with the chemo you start to taste it. It is metallic, just metallic poison is the closest thing I can say about it. The second I started to taste that I felt nauseous so they recommended that I suck on peppermints. To this day I cannot eat an after dinner mint.
I still can't play Nintendo either because my sister would play Mario Brothers for hours and hours just to entertain me. I would just lie on the couch and she would play to entertain me and I still get nauseous when I talk about it or see my Nintendo set. I never understood post traumatic stress disorder until now.
"They say I will have Hodgkin's for the rest of my life, but I am working on getting rid of it."
As soon as my chemo was over I got into my head that I was going to do as much as I could. I really started trying to build up my stamina and strength. I started doing classes at the gym and it took me about a month to finally get through the whole class even at the low level I was trying to do it at. You really are starting from scratch and you have to realize that you need to be gentle and kind to yourself and you can't do everything that you used to be able to do. I try to eat well -- I am not so good at that -- I drink a gallon of water a day, I take a mushroom supplement, massage, yoga, mediation. I'm three years out and I'm happy. Five years is that magic number that you need to get to for the doctors to look at you a little less carefully, but I feel good.