Posts by Eric Lewis6

gentletiger46, I went through the exact same thing... honestly, they didn't even have the decency to tell me face-to-face that I had Hodgkin; they just dropped the news on my parents instead. And I'm 28 years old! Like, seriously, what kind of people do that?🙄
Look, even if you're dealing with Hodgkin, it's not like it's an impossible mountain to climb. It’s definitely doable. It just takes a while. You go through about 2-3 months of chemo followed by radiation, and then you're back in the game.👍

And hey, you can actually use that downtime to enjoy the stuff you never would've had time for otherwise. For me, I finally sat down and knocked out those books I'd been planning to read forever and all that. Hang in there.

So, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin disease just a few months ago...
For like a month or two, my skin was itching like crazy, especially around my ankles and my elbows... I’m talking literal sleepless nights because of it. I went to several different dermatologists, and they all just kept telling me my skin looked perfectly healthy. They’d give me the usual runaround—suggesting I look for allergens, blaming stress, blah blah blah—until things finally hit the breaking point. I decided to go in for a full checkup at the Mayo Clinic. I was there on a Saturday, which isn't usually when they run cardiac CT scans, but by some stroke of pure luck, the specialist happened to be walking in right as I was heading out. He caught a pericardial effusion around my heart during the scan. It turned into an emergency hospital trip, and it took about ten days of testing before they finally told me it was Hodgkin, and that it was almost certainly what caused the fluid buildup around my heart. If it hadn't been for that lucky timing at the clinic, I’d probably still be sitting here scratching myself all night, thinking I was losing my mind or just making things up. 🙂