Cortney Stevens survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma | adriamycin | bleomycin | vinblastine | dacarbazine | lupron
DESCRIPTION
In 2018, an avid runner, Cortney Stevens suddenly started feeling unusually tired and unusually itchy. Seeking medical attention, the first doctor she went to said she had a six-inch mediastinal mass that went from her left lung to her clavicle, but that it wasn’t cancer. However, Cortney sought a second opinion, and after further testing, she was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was put on a chemotherapy regimen of adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine, plus external beam radiation. Cortney cycles because she can no longer run competitively, and she can no longer have children, but she has achieved survivorship.
Cortney was accustomed to running long distances and competing in half marathons, but in August 2018, she began to feel extremely tired all the time. She would feel so fatigued that she would fall asleep at work. In addition, she would feel so itchy that she would scratch the itch until she bled. Because she was training for a half marathon, she attributed her fatigue to her training. But then she suffered a burning sensation anytime she as much took a sip of alcohol. She decided it time to seek medical attention when there was pain in her left arm. It became discolored, was hot to the touch and swelled to approximately twice the size of her right arm.
A six-inch mediastinal mass was discovered. It extended from her left lung to her clavicle. A biopsy was taken of a lymph node in her neck and her oncologist said cancer was not indicated, that instead the problem was likely a soft tissue disorder. However, Cortney’s family was skeptical. She switched hospitals, and when more extensive tests were conducted, she was told she had Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Cortney was placed on a six-month chemotherapy regimen. Known commonly as ABVD chemo, it consisted of adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine. She also had an on-body injector of Neulasta after each round of chemo. With every other chemotherapy round, she was given a shot of Lupron in an attempt to preserve her fertility.
Once the chemo was completed, residual activity was detected in the mass in her chest. As a result, she needed 20 rounds of external beam radiation. The radiation was effective, and in 2019, Cortney Stevens was told there was no evidence of disease.
A byproduct of chemotherapy, Cortney felt neuropathy in her hands and feet. The neuropathy in her hands went away, but it remained in her feet, leaving them numb at times. That is why she can no longer run competitively. However, she does cycle vigorously on her stationary bike. Cortney and her husband learned the Lupron was not effective, and as a result, she will not be able to bear children. That said, she still thinks of herself as a mom to her nieces, nephews, her two dogs and a cat.
Additional Resources:
Additional Resources:
Cortney’s website:
Cortney’s book:
“Surviving Chaos,” a cautionary tale about what happens when your world implodes
It’s available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, plus her publisher,
TRANSCRIPT
Cortney Stevens Description
TITLE:
Cortney Stevens survived Hodgkin’s lymphoma | adriamycin | bleomycin | vinblastine | dacarbazine | lupron
KEYWORDS:
hodgkin’s lymphoma, chemotherapy, adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, dacarbazine,
neulasta, external beam radiation, lupron, neuropathy, cbc blood panel,
premature ovarian failure, sedimentation blood test, subclavian vein, mediastinal mass,
spindle cells
DESCRIPTION:
In 2018, an avid runner, Cortney Stevens suddenly started feeling unusually tired and unusually itchy. Seeking medical attention, the first doctor she went to said she had a six-inch mediastinal mass that went from her left lung to her clavicle, but that it wasn’t cancer. However, Cortney sought a second opinion, and after further testing, she was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was put on a chemotherapy regimen of adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine, plus external beam radiation. Cortney cycles because she can no longer run competitively, and she no longer have children, but she has achieved survivorship.
Cortney was accustomed to running long distances and competing in half marathons, but in August 2018, she began to feel extremely tired all the time. She would feel so fatigued that she would fall asleep at work. In addition, she would feel so itchy that she would scratch the itch until she bled. Because she was training for a half marathon, she attributed her fatigue to her training. But then she suffered a burning sensation anytime she as much took a sip of alcohol. She decided it time to seek medical attention when there was pain in her left arm. It became discolored, was hot to the touch and swelled to approximately twice the size of her right arm.
A six-inch mediastinal mass was discovered. It extended from her left lung to her clavicle. A biopsy was taken of a lymph node in her neck and her oncologist said cancer was not indicated, that instead the problem was likely a soft tissue disorder. However, Cortney’s family was skeptical. She switched hospitals, and when more extensive tests were conducted, she was told she had Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Cortney was placed on a six-month chemotherapy regimen. Known commonly as ABVD chemo, it consisted of adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine. She also had an on-body injector of Neulasta after each round of chemo. With every other chemotherapy round, she was given a shot of Lupron in an attempt to preserve her fertility.
Once the chemo was completed, residual activity was detected in the mass in her chest. As a result, she needed 20 rounds of external beam radiation. The radiation was effective, and in 2019, Cortney Stevens was told there was no evidence of disease.
A byproduct of chemotherapy, Cortney felt neuropathy in her hands and feet. The neuropathy in her hands went away, but it remained in her feet, leaving them numb at times. That is why she can no longer run competitively. However, she does cycle vigorously on her stationary bike. Cortney and her husband learned the Lupron was not effective, and as a result, she will not be able to bear children. That said, she still thinks of herself as a mom to her nieces, nephews, her two dogs and a cat.
Additional Resources:
Additional Resources:
Cortney’s website:
Cortney’s book:
“Surviving Chaos,” a cautionary tale about what happens when your world implodes
It’s available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, plus her publisher,
TRANSCRIPT
Bruce Morton: Welcome. This is the @CancerInterviews podcast, and I am your host, prostate cancer survivor Bruce Morton. Our guest on this episode began to feel extremely tired and extremely itchy. This turned into a diagnosis of Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma for Cortney Stevens of Wendell, North Carolina. She went through a four-pronged regimen of chemotherapy, followed by external beam radiation, but achieved survivorship, and she has gone on to document her story in a book. Cortney has a powerful story, and now is the time to hear it.
Cortney Stevens: Hi, Bruce. Thanks so much for having me.
BM: Before we get to your cancer journey, we would like to learn about you and your life away from cancer. If you would, tell us about where you are from, what you have done for work and what you like to do for fun.
CS: I am Cortney Stevens, I am 35 years old. I was diagnosed at 26. Originally, I grew up in a small town in Wisconsin called Florence, but I now call Wendell, North Carolina home. I live here with my husband and my three amazing fur children, two dogs and a cat. For work, I am a senior HR assistance manager. For fun, I definitely enjoy Pelotoning, so you will find me on my Peloton getting as many miles as I can, biking. I love spending time with my friends and family and I really enjoy baking.
BM: For anyone diagnosed with cancer, there was that time when something about our health seemed abnormal, which eventually turned into a diagnosis. For you, what were the symptoms?
CS: It’s funny. My body was giving me all kinds of signs that something was wrong, but I was able to write it off. I am extremely tired, but I was also training for a half-marathon, so I equated the tiredness to running so much. But this was unusual. I would fall asleep on my floor during lunch time at my office. I would take a nap on the floor. There were times in which my body was extremely itchy and I would scratch myself until I would bleed. I had just moved to North Carolina. I thought maybe it was my body adjusting to the atmosphere, so I wrote it off as that. Then I had this weird alcohol intolerance thing going. Not a drink but just a sip of alcohol, the left side of my body would start burning and I would have just this horrible, painful sensation. This I could write off, so instead of writing it off, I just stopped drinking alcohol and that seemed to fix the problem. All of that was happening, but the major event that made me realize something was wrong, I ended up going to the ER after a run one day. On the run I began to feel really woozy, really tired. When I came back home, I fell on the couch and fell asleep. When I woke up, my left arm was swollen, discolored, hot to the touch and I was in so much pain, I couldn’t move it. I had no idea what was happening, but if you looked at my arm, it was almost twice the size of my other arm. My family freaked out and said I had to go to the hospital. That is what started a terrible event of situations, but that is when I initially realized something was wrong.
BM: Let’s talk about what happened when you went to the hospital.CS: When I got to the hospital, it took awhile to be seen. I was waiting in the ER for about four hours and in that time I had so much pain happening in my left arm. When I was seen in the emergency room, they did a CBC blood panel on me, they did a sedimentation blood test, they took an x-ray of my chest and an ultrasound of my arm. So, there were a lot of things happening because people didn’t know exactly what the issue was. After I finished all my tests, the doctor told me my sedimentation blood rate was an 82. For context, a normal sed rate is in the teens. It was incredibly high. Something was very, very wrong. When they were doing the ultrasound, that is when they confirmed that I had a giant blood clot on top of my jugular vein and went down to my elbow. It was about two feet long. That was what was causing so much pain and swelling in my left arm because the blood in my arm wasn’t able to return to my heart. They sent me home that night. I got a call the next day that the doctor had reviewed that same x-ray they had taken the night before. They saw a shadow on the x-ray, and they wanted me back for more testing. It was around my heart. When I got back to the hospital, they did a CT scan of my chest to see what was going on. That’s when the doctor told me it wasn’t just a shadow, but a six-inch mediastinal mass growing around my heart. It started at the bottom of my lung, was curved kind of like a giant banana that curved around my heart into my clavicle, which is what caused the blood clot because it caused my subclavian vein to collapse.
BM: Those symptoms sound awful. Did they add up to cancer at that time?
CS: No. We did not know I had cancer. I had a really unorthodox diagnosis. Not only did this happen, I had that oncologist tell me after an echogram on my heart, they did not come up with cancer. I finally got to do a lymph node biopsy in my neck. It took a week to get those results back, and they got them, they saw spindle cells, which don’t usually live in tissue, so they sent the results to the Cleveland Clinic for a second opinion to see what they thought was going on. When I got to Cleveland, it took another week. The amount of waiting was unreal. It took another week for Cleveland to come back and say there was no cancer in the sample, and to their credit, there wasn’t. So, my doctor at the first hospital told me I didn’t have cancer. He thought I had some sort of connective tissue disorder, and I needed surgery to get the mass removed. When I told my boyfriend’s parents, who are now my in-laws, they didn’t buy it. They said this local hospital doesn’t have the best track record, and that I should seek a second opinion. I ended up going to the Duke University hospital in Durham, North Carolina, which was important because Duke ended up saving my life. In my two weeks at Duke, a thoracic surgeon met me right away the doctor at the first hospital had no right to tell me I didn’t have cancer because nobody knew what the mass in my chest was made of. They didn’t do a biopsy of the six-inch mass in my chest. They instead picked a small lymph node in my neck. So, they did a biopsy at Duke. When those results came back, it took another week for those results to come back and they confirmed I did have Hodgkin lymphoma. I thought that was going to be the worst of it, but then a week after that, I went through a PET scan and then I had to do a bone marrow biopsy. When I did both of those, I sat in front of my new oncologist who told me not only that I had cancer, but it was Stage IV. I had activity in the mass in my chest, in my spleen, in my liver and in my bone marrow.
BM: By the way, we hope you will find time to like and subscribe to our channel. And if you hit the bell icon, you will be notified anytime we post an interview. We also want to remind you that on Cancer Interviews, we are not distributors of medical advice. If you seek medical advice, please a licensed health care professional.
Now, Cortney, this is quite a rollercoaster you were on. You went from being told you didn’t have cancer to being told you did, and then told you were Stage IV. How did you deal with all that?
CS: It was exactly as you described, a rollercoaster I felt I couldn’t get off of. I was beginning to get to a point in which I didn’t know who I could trust. Could I trust the first doctor? Could I trust the second doctor? I would definitely say that I tend to be a positive person, and so when I first found out that I had cancer, I was devastated. I was 26 years old, just kind of coming into my career, just kind of coming into adulthood and I had just started dating my now-husband. We hadn’t been together very long. It just snowballed into me because all my friends and family were back in Wisconsin. I now had cancer. I didn’t really know what my path forward was, so thankfully for me, I kind of collapsed in on my myself where the implosion came from, but everybody around me were people I had just met, my husband, my husband’s family, my friends in North Carolina, even my friends back home, they really rallied around me, I couldn’t have done this without them. If it wasn’t for my support group, I don’t think I would have made it.
BM: And part of that was because you had to go through a very rigorous regimen. If you would, describe the regimen.
CS: I had a chemo protocol of ABVD, which is four different kinds of chemo. They are Adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine. You go in for a treatment. I did twelve rounds of ABVD chemotherapy and it took about six months to get from the start to the finish. It was every two weeks. On top of that, each chemo treatment the on-body injector contained Neulasta, which helps to boost your white blood cell count. They attach to this little device on my arm and 24 hours after chemo, it would go off, so I didn’t have to go into the hospital to get it; it was already on my body. In addition, every other chemo, I would receive a shot called Lupron. I was 26 years old, I hadn’t had kids yet and wanted to preserve my fertility.
BM: Cortney, there is no such thing as a pleasant chemo regimen. The unpleasant component varies from person to person, but for you, what was the most unpleasant part?
CS: The toughest part for me was, I never really knew what was going to happen. I had the core symptoms. I had nausea, I lost my hair, I was tired. Those were probably my top three, but every chemo kind of treated me differently. Sometimes it was like spinning a wheel. We called it Wheel of Symptoms. Sometimes I would get this really horrible rash. I mean, my hands would break out. There were times in which chemo would make me lose my ability to taste. There were others that would make me lose my ability to see things clearly. My vision would start to go blurry, so the worst part for me was the uncertainty. It was exhausting. I had never been so tired in my life. I had never been so sick in my life. And in a way, I had never been so depressed in my life.
BM: Now, we mentioned at the top this four-pronged chemo regimen, but it was followed by external beam radiation. What do you remember about that part of your treatment?
CS: After I finished the twelve rounds of chemo, I thought we were done. I went to the doctor, we were waiting for the all-clear, we get to the doctor and he said there was a little bit left of the mass in my chest. As a result, I would have to go through a few rounds of radiation. I ended up going for the external beam radiation. I did 20 rounds of that. What I will say for me, radiation was a cakewalk compared to chemo. Chemo was one of those things. It knocked me out. I was sick. I couldn’t function on chemo. With radiation, all I had to do was sit on a table and this machine with a laser beam hit on the mass itself and it was able to target its treatment instead of a full-body treatment with chemo. To me, I didn’t feel anything. I wasn’t being injected with anything. It was just kind of happening around me. The worst symptom I had with radiation, there was this red irritation on my chest, kind of like a sunburn. I also had bad heartburn because they were radiating right where my trachea was and it was possible that was causing more heartburn, but that was it for radiation. I was still able to take radiation and go back to work, whereas with chemo, I had to take six months of short-term disability leave. I could not work.
BM: But eventually you achieved survivorship. What was it like when you were told there was no evidence of disease?
CS: That would have been April of 2019. I finished chemo in January 2019, then had to do my rounds of radiation following after that. I remember going to the doctor, thinking we did the chemo, we did the radiation, I should be good to go, right? I remember when the doctors came in and they were very excited and then they told me there was no evidence of cancer anymore, that I was cancer-free and I was officially in remission. That was April 9, 2019.
BM: In terms of the here and now, from a physical perspective, is there anything you cannot do that you could do before your diagnosis?
CS: There are two things. The first one is, I got really bad neuropathy in my hands and feet during chemo. The neuropathy in my hands went away, but the neuropathy in my feet did not. I used to be a big runner prior to chemo, and the reason I switched over to biking is because I cannot run like I used to. I can run, but not like I used to. The other thing that I am not able to do involves fertility. That’s why I took the Lupron shots. Unfortunately, we learned they were not effective, so my body went into premature ovarian failure and I am no longer able to have my own children.
BM: As you watch, as you listen, we would like to hear from you. We would like to hear where you are watching from, as well as your thoughts on our guest’s story.
Now, Cortney, we want to mention one other thing we referenced at the top, and that is your book. Tell us about it.
CS: This fall, a book I had been working for three years was published. It is called, “Surviving Chaos,” a cautionary tale about what happens when your world implodes, and that’s what happened to me. My world imploded. I had gone from running eight miles a day, ten miles a day, getting ready for my half marathon, and then I had cancer. First, it was I didn’t have, then I did, then it was Stage IV. I documented this whole thing because when I was going through this, I was looking for a book that would help me get through this process and I just couldn’t find it. I was looking for something like this that would help me walk me through it, so my goal is that it helps people in impossible situations. It doesn’t have to be cancer. It is whenever your imploding, this book has something you can relate to. I also hope this will help caregivers. I wrote this book in a way so that you are walking side by side with me. I will hope it will help caregivers to better help cancer survivors.
BM: Cortney, this is a great story regarding your journey and your book and how they can help others. Cortney Stevens, Wendell, North Carolina, thanks so much for being with us on Cancer Interviews.
CS: Thanks, Bruce.
BM: And we want to remind you as we always do upon wrapping up, that if you or a loved one are on a cancer journey, you are not alone. There are survivors like Cortney Stevens, there are supporters like her husband, who can ease the cancer journey. So, until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.
Additional Resources:
Cortney’s website:
Cortney’s book:
“Surviving Chaos,” a cautionary tale about what happens when your world implodes
It’s available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, plus her publisher,
SHOW NOTES
Cortney’s book:
“Surviving Chaos,” a cautionary tale about what happens when your world implodes
It’s available through Amazon and Barnes & Noble, plus her publisher,
SHOW NOTES
TITLE: Cortney Stevens, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma Survivor – Wendell, North Carolina, USA
In 2018, an avid runner, Cortney Stevens suddenly started feeling unusually tired and unusually itchy. Seeking medical attention, the first doctor she went to said she had a six-inch mediastinal mass that went from her left lung to her clavicle, but that it wasn’t cancer. However, Cortney sought a second opinion, and after further testing, she was diagnosed with Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma. She was put on a chemotherapy regimen of adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine and dacarbazine, plus external beam radiation. Cortney cycles because she can no longer run competitively, and she no longer have children, but she has achieved survivorship.
Additional Resources:
Cortney’s website: https://www.cortneystevensbooks.com
Time Stamps:
02:11 Cortney recalls feeling extremely fatigued and itchy in 2018.
04:01 Recalls her initial trip to the hospital, where a giant blood clot was detected.
05:40 A subsequent CT scan revealed a six-inch mediastinal mass.
08:45 A second biopsy confirmed a diagnosis of Stage IV Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
11:40 Cortney describes her four-pronged chemotherapy regimen.
18:51 She remembers learning she had achieved survivorship.
19:54 Cortney is asked if there is anything physically, she cannot do that she could do before her diagnosis.
KEYWORDS (tags):
hodgkin’s lymphoma
adriamycin
bleomycin
vinblastine
dacarbazine
neulasta
lupron
external beam radiation
neuropathy
premature ovarian failure
sedimentation blood test
subclavian vein
mediastinal mass
spindle cells
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