Katharina Buczek
The doctors ended up putting her under anesthesia, removing part of her lymph node, and Melea believed everything was “back to normal”– until she received the dreaded call from her doctor.
“A week later, the doctor called me and said they sent it [her lymph node sample] off to the lab, and it came back as cancerous,” Melea mentioned.
After processing the terrifying news, she was referred to a “great oncologist” for a PET scan. Again, Melea held onto hope.
“The oncologist said this was the earliest case he had ever seen. He had never seen such an isolated region and said that if we do radiation on that one spot, it would probably never come back,” she explained.
So, Melea went through with the radiation and tried to stay positive despite the toll on her emotional and physical health. And eventually, she felt like “everything started to go back to normal.”
That was until one month later when Melea had her post-radiation PET scan.
“I was sitting in the waiting room alone, and they told me that there were two more lymphomas inside of my body,” she explained.
Understandably, Melea’s heart broke. She had been so optimistic throughout the entire process that she did not even ask anyone to accompany her to the follow-up. Melea had believed that everything would be okay.
“I was crying and very freaked out. Then I asked the doctor if that meant I would have to do more radiation and chemotherapy, and the doctor looked at me and said no,” she recalled.
That day, Melea, unfortunately, learned that she had an incurable disease. No amount of treatment would help her condition. The only thing that her doctors can do is “watch and wait.”
“A lot of people live twenty more years, a lot of people live forty more years. And when something flares up, then we will treat it. But if not, you are just going to keep coming back three times a year for the rest of your life,” Melea’s doctor told her.
