Lymphoma
The story below describes how Living With Lymphoma provided educational and supportive information for someone whose life has been affected by cancer. By enrolling in Living With Lymphoma, you too will have access to important information that may help you take an active role in your own care.
Patrick, Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma Caregiver
Washington
“When we heard the diagnosis of cancer, we were just shocked—you don't expect it. But it's important I
think to have somebody with you that you can trust and who can go through the process with you
because it's quite a process. Especially lymphoma, because it's a disease where it's more of a marathon as
opposed to a sprint, you know. If things go well, it's going to be a long-term situation in a lot of cases.
And for us, I think our first questions were, how should we treat it? We didn't have a background dealing
with lymphoma, so we were really in the dark in what the best approach would be. I think a lot of times
you can be inhibited and talking to a physician, you know, they're experts and as a layman, you can feel
that you don't have the knowledge to really ask good questions, but you do. I mean, the doctors are
interested in what the patient's experiencing and what your issues are.
The very comprehensive approach to Living With Lymphoma laid everything out for us: how to deal, how
you need to have a team approach with your primary care physician, your oncologist, nurse oncologist. It
laid out about the disease in an easy to understand format that was really helpful. In fact, it gets to the
heart of the matter in a concise way. You don't have to go through reams and reams of material, and
that's important because you want to focus on what you need to focus on. I recommend it to people who
are newly diagnosed because it's just a great presentation of how you need to approach lymphoma and
the different elements you need to be thinking about.
Living With Lymphoma really gave us confidence to talk to the various specialists, and helped us know who
the individuals are and how to talk to them, what questions to ask. What we used the most often was the
information on how to approach the disease with a team of individuals. You know, incorporating your
primary care physician along with the oncologist and nurse and a social worker, and the different types of
oncology specialties that you might deal with like a radiation oncologist and surgical oncologist.”
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