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Lymphoma

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Hodgkin's Lymphoma

Interview 24

Interview 24

Age at Interview: 41
Sex: Female
Age at Diagnosis: 19
Background: Picture Research Manager, married with two children aged 5 and 2. Ethnic background: White British.

Brief outline:Diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease in 1984, which relapsed in 1996, and non-Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2004. Treated with radiotherapy, chemotherapy, rituximab and autologous stem cell transplant. In remission.

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After being discharged from hospital after her stem cell transplant she spent days in bed at home and repeatedly felt too exhausted to return to work.
Print After my three-and-a-half weeks I really did not want to go home, I felt so weak I was practically on my knees begging the staff to keep me. But they said, “Look you're going to feel like this for a long time, you've got to get a way of coping, being back at home again. We want to get you out of the hospital, the sooner you get out the sooner you're going to start your recovery.” So I gritted my teeth and came home. That was probably the hardest part of all in some ways because I was so exhausted and tired that I could hardly move, and some days I would just lie in bed all day, sometimes I'd manage to crawl down onto the sofa for a bit. We'd got to the bit about post stem cell transplant. That was very hard because I was so exhausted all the time and I expected to come home and to get better quite quickly, and I sort of thought, “Oh April”, I thought, “Well by July I'll be feeling a lot better”, and I thought, “Oh maybe I'll just have the summer and then I'll go back to work in the autumn”, and I was thinking, “Maybe I'll go back to work in September”, and then I thought, “Maybe I'll go back to work in November”. And I just carried on being exhausted all the time.

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