Mary Sage: Initial Thoughts

Well, I recall driving in the car with my son Tom, my youngest, who was about 9 at the time and he was upset because he had to go to a babysitters or whatever while I went out to the hospital for a test and he was putting up a fuss so I said to him, “this is serious, I have to go have this test, you don’t have an option”, I said “I might have cancer”. And at that point it was the first time that I had ever actually thought that, that could be the possibility and so then of course he went willingly, but I was sort of sorry to put a guilt trip on him, but at that point I realized that, that could be what it was and even though it was quite awhile until we actually got the diagnosis, that’s still in the back of your mind that yes it could be cancer. Now when they finally told me that it was Hodgkin’s Lymphoma and that I’d probably would need chemotherapy and then radiation, I was prepared for the worse because years before that in 1970 our son Michael had leukemia and he was in the hospital for his chemotherapy and he was in the hospital for weeks at a time getting his chemotherapy, so I was figuring that, that would probably be the case with me too, and I was very relieved to hear that progress had been made to the point where I would only need to come in on an out patient basis, it would only take a couple of hours, they gave me an anti-nausea drug before the chemotherapy and then gave me the chemotherapy and then I could go home and continue on with my daily routine. So it was so much better as a result of all the research and everything that had been done in the interim. Mike was diagnosed in 1970 and I was diagnosed in 1995, so in that 25 years the research and progress had been phenomenal. Now we need to continue and keep going to make it even better.