Hodgkin Lymphoma: Knowing the Long-Term Treatment Effects
Most nurses will likely encounter a Hodgkin lymphoma (HL) survivor at some point, but will they know what to assess for?
‘Hodgkin’s is the good one to get.’
When I was going to graduate school, I worked part-time for a hematologist who mostly treated people with leukemias and lymphomas. Many of them had Hodgkin lymphoma (though we called it Hodgkin’s disease then). I administered chemotherapy, did a lot of patient teaching and a lot of listening and answering questions for this largely young group of patients. Most were close to my own age; it was easy to relate to their shock at finding out they had a life-threatening disease and that the treatment would not be easy.
I especially recall two young women—one had gone to her physician for a pre-marriage physical; the other went for a check-up because she felt she wasn’t “bouncing back” from the birth of her daughter three months previously. They were distraught at the diagnosis, and as they went through chemotherapy, they were often depressed over the side effects from the drugs: hair loss, GI upset, and fatigue.
But both of them did well. I remember the physician telling them his standard line, “If you had to get cancer, Hodgkin’s is the good one to get,” since it was often curable […]