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Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma Cancer Survitor: Embracing Life
In 2003, Stacy Marino was planning for her funeral, now she's living every day to the fullest
By JOHN PRZYBYS
REVIEW-JOURNAL
February 15, 2005 - Stacy Marino, 27, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma at the age of 23 and has seen her life since then altered in nearly every way. Marino and her daughter, Shea Lynn, share a moment beside the pond at their home.
While Marino now wears wigs, a family snapshot shows the former hairstylist during the course of one of her early treatment regimens.
Stacy Marino says her mother, Judy Wangler, and the rest of her family have proven to be invaluable during her cancer batttle.
Except for the pain in her chest, Christmas Day 2000 was a pretty good one for Stacy Marino.
Marino was an independent-minded 23-year-old. She had a job she loved, a family who loved her, a husband and, best of all, a baby on the way.
In hindsight, there was no way Marino -- nor her doctors or, for that matter, anyone else -- could have known that that pain in her chest would mark the beginning of a grueling four-year-long battle with cancer.
"I remember feeling really uncomfortable that day," recalls Marino, now 27, who was about seven months pregnant at the time. "My chest hurt. I thought, `What's wrong with me?' "
While the pain eventually went away, it would return, off-and-on, over the next several weeks. And after Marino's daughter, Shea Lynn, was born in February 2001, it became worse.
"I was up all night," Marino recalls, "and not because she was up."
About eight weeks after Shea was born, Marino ended her maternity leave and returned to her job as a hairstylist. But, on her first day back, Marino says, "my arm got swollen and was purple."
Marino went to an emergency room, where doctors diagnosed a blood clot. But a shadow on an X-ray film showed something else, too.
"I had this pretty good-sized tumor behind my sternum," Marino says.
Doctors ordered a CT scan. And, Marino recalls, a doctor "rolled in, and it was a blur to me what he said. All I remember is: ` ... and it looked like blah, blah, blah. And it's cancer.' "
"Your world just spins," Marino says. "I wanted to smack the guy -- like, `Shut up!' " Then she asked the obvious question. "I said, `Am I gonna die?' "
Dr. Paul E. Michael, an oncologist at Comprehensive Cancer Centers of Nevada, saw Marino shortly after the initial diagnosis of non-Hodgkins lymphoma was made.
Even though the tumor was large, "the initial prognosis for her was good," Michael says. "For non-Hodgkins lymphoma, generally speaking, you have a reasonably good prognosis if you can catch it early enough and it hasn't spread."
Marino started what would turn out to be several months' worth of chemotherapy and radiation treatments. In 2001, she also divorced her husband, ending, she explains, a marriage that already had been on shaky ground.
Marino wasn't thrilled about her disease or the treatments she had to tough out for it, but felt optimistic that she'd beat it. But, she now realizes, "I hadn't even gone through a scratch of it."
In late 2001, not long before the treatments ended, Marino was diagnosed with pancreatitis and gallstones. During surgery, doctors found that cancer had spread throughout her liver and gall bladder.
Marino began a grueling series of high-dose chemotherapy treatments and began taking a antibody therapy drug called Rituxan. Then, in February 2002, came another setback: An MRI scan showed that the cancer had spread to her brain.
Every day for more than a month, doctors irradiated the tumors in her brain. After the first few sessions, the intense pain Marino was having in her lower back led to the discovery of tumors there, too. So, Marino began to undergo a full course of head and pelvic radiation therapy.
Marino's cancer was so aggressive that her best chance of survival was a stem-cell transplant that would help to build up her immune system.
While the procedure often is called a bone-marrow transplant, it's actually stem cells that are transplanted, Michael explains. "It's like giving yourself a blood transfusion."
In the spring of 2002, Marino traveled to City of Hope in California for the procedure. By now the cumulative effects of the cancer, the chemotherapy and radiation and the stem-cell treatment were causing Marino almost unbearable, almost daily pain.
It was "the worst hell I've ever been through," she says. "I was so incredibly sick. You're in so much pain you can't even brush your teeth because your mouth will bleed."
The problem, according to Michael, is that cancer patients can experience not only the effects of the cancer itself, but side effects from the radiation and toxic medications used to battle it.
Marino suffered serious heart and lung problems, as well as such painful but comparatively minor side effects as peeling skin on her head from the radiation treatments, migraines from chemotherapy and radiation, nausea and infections.
"I could tell you details for hours," Marino says. "This was, like, never-ending, and it was very frustrating."
What kept her going?
"I don't know," Marino answers. "Some days it was one thing, some days it was something else. It's a good thing we don't know what's going to happen in the future, because it's like, `Oh, it'll just end in a day.' "
Still, Marino continues, "at this point, I've already gone over a year, thinking, `Oh, it'll be over any day.' And, a lot of days, I just hoped I wouldn't wake up the next day."
"Thank goodness for my wonderful family," Marino says. "That's all I have to say."
However, as the cancer continued to spread and the medical problems continued to snowball, "I was losing it," Marino says.
At one point, she wanted to end the high-dose chemotherapy that was making her so sick.
"I was like, `I can't do this anymore,' " Marino says. "I was crying, and my mom gets real bitchy and said, `If you think for one minute I'm gonna be here telling your daughter you didn't fight hard enough.'
"And I'm like, `OK. OK.' It made sense. She was right. She's not gonna do it. So I did the chemo."
In May 2003, Marino learned that the cancer had returned to her lung.
"I just couldn't believe it," Marino says. "There was nothing left to do. My doctor called Sloan-Kettering and other doctors, and there was nothing else I could do."
It's difficult, Michael says, when a doctor has done everything possible and "it ends up not going as well as we'd hoped. So we told Stacy, `We don't know if we're sure we can cure you.' "
"I went up and down with that," Marino recalls. "For a few days, it was like, `Hey, at least it makes it easy because I don't have to make a choice.' And then I'd get really depressed."
Marino bought birthday cards for her daughter through age 21, as well as "the little graduations in-between and a couple of `hey, whatever' cards. I spent about $80 on cards at Hallmark for her, just so she would have something from me in her life."
She arranged for her own burial.
"I had a friend murdered a few years ago, and I just decided, `Well, I'll pick out a spot next to him,' " Marino says. "My mom and I went to look (at the plot) and we were doing fine, and we saw this lady standing over somebody's grave. She knelt down and started to touch it, and I just lost it."
But, Marino continues, "I see it as fortunate that I had a tap on the shoulder. Some people get taken so fast -- in a car accident or whatever, or they're murdered like my friend was -- they just had no chance to do what we were doing.
"We were making these decisions. I felt really good about that. I had a pink-and-white casket and I was, like, `That's me.' "
In November 2003, Marino was back in the hospital with more heart and lung problems.
"I was going into heart failure, and my doctors just looked at me funny," Marino says. "I knew this isn't good. They knew and I knew."
Marino decided against any more biopsies or any more procedures. And, she says, "a few days later, I felt all right. Not the greatest, but I seemed to improve.
"After a few weeks, they said, `You don't look like your scans.' I said, `I don't feel like it, either.' "
Somehow, for some reason, Marino was getting better.
Her doctor was "speechless," Marino says. "He said, `I don't know what to say.' I kind of giggled. He said, `It's a miracle, and I'm gonna leave it at that.' "
"That was over a year ago," Marino says, "and I haven't been in the hospital since."
Marino still is not out of the woods. She continues to take Rituxan and medications designed to boost her immune system. She'll receive regular scans and checkups to ensure that cancer hasn't returned. And it's not yet certain how badly the massive doses of radiation and chemotherapy drugs she's received have damaged her body and organs.
But, Michael says, "she's in remission about 15 months. That means we can't find any evidence of cancer. It does not mean cured. In doctor terms, `cured' means a person lives five years without evidence of disease."
Marino can't work and receives disability payments. She lives on the same property as her mother, stepfather and grandmother, an arrangement that she's discovered she loves.
"How many people really get four generations all living together?" Marino asks.
She continues to struggle with the after-effects, both practical and intangible, of her four-year battle.
For instance, Marino says, "I have hair, but it looks like dandelions going to seed or something like that. It's just so ironic, because my whole life I was obsessed with hair.
"I don't know. If I'm being taught a lesson, I don't know what that lesson that would be," Marino says.
She laughs. "Probably vanity, I guess."
Then, not joking at all, Marino says that, physically, "I'm 27 and I feel like about 67."
She hopes her health will continue to improve.
"I'm not looking for leaps and bounds, but I can function normally most of the time," Marino says. "I'm tired all the time."
"I still say, `Wow, what would happen if they told me something came back?' That's still so possible," Marino says. "People say, `Don't think about it.' OK, that's like telling somebody not to breathe, and I don't force it away.
"There are days I wake up and cry, not because of the fact I could get sick again but the fact that so much is different in such an amount of time."
While she can't fully fathom what it might be, Marino is convinced that "things happen for a reason.
"I had a client recently say something about, `What would you do differently or take back?' I said, `You know what? Probably nothing.' I don't think I'd ever want to do it again. In fact, I know. My God, I don't know how I did it."
For now, Marino finds strength in her family, her child and the support group she attends regularly.
"It's the best place you'll ever go," she explains. "I don't care how you feel. It's such a cleansing place."
"You never meet someone with cancer who's not a good person," Marino adds. "I've never known a creep to get cancer."
She laughs.
"They say -- whoever `they' are -- the good die young. And I didn't die, so ..."
U of R President Diagnosed With Cancer
UR President Diagnosed With Cancer
8/21/07 - Patrice Walsh (Rochester, N.Y.) - Joel Seligman, 57, leads the University of Rochester and its medical center, and now he’ll rely on the doctors he oversees to treat his own cancer, discovered just weeks ago.
Not much scares Joel Seligman. That was, until he learned the lump in his neck was cancerous.
"The word cancer is a scary one,” he admitted. "The only symptom I have is a lump in the throat.”
Seligman found the lump while shaving and immediately called his doctor.
"When I say I am lucky…it was visible, I am fortunate," he said.
Seligman says he was encouraged by his board members to get a second opinion. He'll travel to the Sloan Kettering Cancer Institute in New York City Monday but says it won't change his treatment options.
He'll receive chemo and radiation at UR beginning in two weeks.
Seligman says he's in good hands: his friend and colleague Dr. Richard Fisher, a lymphoma expert and director of the UR’s James Wilmot Cancer Center will treat his cancer. Fisher said survival rates are 85 to 90 percent with this type of cancer.
"For the university community I will not be stepping back on anything we started…this is a health issue, but it's no going to stop anything," Seligman said.
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma is one of the most treatable forms of cancer. It commonly occurs between the ages of 58 and 62.
A problem even with this type of cancer is that there usually are no symptoms and often it has spread by the time it's detected.
That wasn't the case, Seligman found it early and so his prognosis is good. He will take weeks of treatment, and will be tired.
He says he will put some things off until the spring but says that won't affect business at UR.
Seligman said he believes in being totally honest. He said that's a sign of a good leader.
He added that he's in the best place to get treatment.
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