Ariella's Immunotherapy Story - Getting her life back after hodgkin lymphoma

When I first learned about immunotherapy, the concept seemed so strange to me. I was just used to this idea that you're on treatment you will feel terrible. I started to develop this really gnarly cough. It didn't really occur to me that it could be cancer or anything like that. I had a giant tumor outside of my right lung. When I was first diagnosed with Hodgkins lymphoma it was kind of pitched to me as one of the most treatable cancers. Typically people are done with it once they do some chemotherapy and radiation and then they're out. They get to walk off into the sun. I was not in that cohort, unfortunately. I was in the refractory group. After going through a couple different treatments that didn't work as well as we would have liked it was coming up senior year and it had metastasized from the chest over to liver and abdomen. I had reached a point where it became this cycle of let's just get enough time to get to the next drug release that could potentially work. Meanwhile, everyone who had graduated with her they were moving out of their homes and they were working. When is that going to be my turn? I was starting to get more sick at this point. I was in a lot of pain. I had lost so much weight from not being able to really keep down food or liquids or anything. I was just so exhausted after all the treatments. I wasn't particularly optimistic. So this was a twenty-three year old girl with a refractory cancer for which she had gotten fourteen prior treatments. And when she came into the clinic, I didn't actually ever see her really stand. She was pretty much grey. And I really felt at the time that this was a real long shot. She received a dose. I saw her the following week, she was just as sick, but a smidgen less. Over time, maybe in about three or four weeks, I actually realized how tall she was. The only thing I experienced was maybe some mild fatigue. Otherwise there was really no nausea or anything else to get in the way from me getting better. I was really able to start thinking about working again and just building up my energy and feeling well. And hanging out with friends and things. It wasn't my entire life anymore. Now she comes in, she's got her laptop she's hanging out she's going to work. She's got her life back. This is about a year and a half later. Wow. Even with the treatment not being in my body right now it still continues to fight off the cancer cells and keep the lymphoma at bay. The idea that there could be a treatment that just harnesses the body's own defenses it's like now we have much better detectives on the case. You have immunotherapies that can be adapted across multiple cancers it just opens up the toolbox and there are so many more options for so many more people. Learn as much as you can and you connect with other folks that really care about it. They're all out there and they're all actively sharing and tweeting and talking about it. I'm so grateful for all the folks that are fundraising and actively raising awareness through the Cancer Research Institute and everyone associated with that. That gets it from the initial stages of research to the clinical trials all the way over to folks like me who, after failing a couple other trials are looking for the next option.