Patty Pittala survived B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma | prednisone | chemotherapy | rituxan | cytoxan

DESCRIPTION

Patty Pittala tells the @CancerInterviews podcast her cancer journey began with symptoms not usually associated with cancer.  In 2017, she would get a cold and would last abnormally long.  Then she would get a debilitating skin rash.  For the rash, she went to a dermatologist and was given large dosages of prednisone and methotrexate.  The rash went away, but Patty found herself constantly fatigued.  A chest biopsy revealed signs of what looked like some sort of lymphoma, which weeks later was diagnosed as B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  Treated with a chemotherapy regimen spearheaded by the drug cytoxin, Patty achieved survivorship, has returned to a healthy lifestyle and has taken up kayaking.

It was bad enough that Patty Pittala of Westford, Vermont was feeling fatigued, but tests showed she had a blood clot that ran from her neck to her left hand.  Next up were x-rays that showed a major mass in her left lung.  That led to the biopsy, after which Patty was told she had lymphoma, doctors could immediately identify the type of lymphoma, but they did rule out lung cancer.

At first, Patty Pittala was again put on prednisone because it had shown to be effective against masses like the one in Patty’s left lung.  Once the diagnosis of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma was made, she needed to wait seven weeks before going on chemotherapy. 

Patty’s regimen began with rituxan.  Then she was given a three-chemical cocktail in a pouch hooked up to a pump, which was attached to her port.  When the bag was empty, it was refilled, a routine that went Monday through Friday.  Then on Fridays she was given an infusion of a chemical called cytoxan, to which she said she had the worst reaction.  Patty said she felt like her glands and joints were inflamed from the bottom of her ribcage to the top of her cheekbones.  As awful as this was, Patty Pittala said with each additional treatment, she could feel results, and that made it easier for her to deal with her physical pain on a mental and emotional basis. 

Eventually, Patty reached survivorship, and was thrilled, but she approached each step of the journey with hope and confidence.

In terms of advice, Patty says to anyone diagnosed with cancer, don’t be afraid to ask questions, and don’t be afraid to seek more knowledge about your diagnosed, because with knowledge, fear has “nowhere to go.”

Additional Resources:

Vermont Cancer Support Network: https://www.info@vcsn.net

TRANSCRIPT

Bruce Morton: Greetings and welcome to the @CancerInterviews podcast.  I’m your host, Bruce Morton.  The battle to overcome lymphoma is difficult, but our guest on this episode survived B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  She is Patty Pittala of Westford, Vermont, and we hope you will find her story to be educational and inspirational.  Here she is, Patty Pittala, and Patty, welcome to Cancer Interviews.

Patty Pittala: Thank you, Bruce, I am honored to be here, honestly.

Bruce: Patty, it is our tradition on Cancer Interviews to start out by learning more about their guests, after all, they are people with lives outside of a cancer journey.  So, tell us about where you are from, what you do for a living and what you do for fun.

Patty: I have been married for 38 years, and I lived in various parts of New Jersey before I got married, and once we got married, we moved to Vermont.  We moved here in 1990, and we have two grown sons.  One lives in Washington state, and one lives in Maine, so they are far away, but we are working on that.  I have always lived a very creative and active lifestyle.  I taught dance, I worked in the floral industry, I owned my own floral shop in Burlington for 15 years, I managed craft shops, did a lot of management and today I have an arts studio outside my house where I do a lot of mixed media art and give workshops, and I started to develop that a little bit more.  I sugar with my husband, so we make maple syrup, and we are getting into our season.  I have fallen in love with kayaking and right now I have a very good job at the local school.  I cook breakfast and lunch for about 145 kids.

Bruce: That sounds like a very healthy lifestyle.  That can make me or anyone watching or listening appreciate even more what you have overcome and makes us want to hear your story.

By the way, we are confident you’ll be able to learn some tips and tools to help you through your cancer journey, but first we’d like to invite you to please give us a ‘like’, leave a comment or review below and share this story with friends.  Kindly click on the ‘subscribe’ button below and click on the bell icon, so you will be notified when we release our next cancer interview.  And if you or a loved one are facing a cancer diagnosis, please click on the link in the description and Show Notes below to check out our free guide, “The Top Ten Things I Wish I Knew When I First Got Cancer.”

Patty, as is the case with all we cancer survivors, there was a time when cancer was the farthest thing from our minds, and then something happened to let us know that in terms of our health, something wasn’t quite right.  When did that happen to you?

Patty: In 2017, I started noticing some subtle health challenges, like I would get colds and they would hold on for way too long and I was tired a lot, and a little bit winded here and there, but towards the end of 2017, I developed between than and May of 2018, I developed a debilitating body rash, it was like shingles times a thousand and it was horrible, and it came from a log cabin resort cleaning cabins, doing maintenance work, but when I was in the laundry room, I seemed to get these flare-ups for some reason, and I will always wonder if this was part of the cancer or was cancer living right alongside this rash, because I feel like I had cancer before, because of some of the symptoms.  So, I will never get the answer to that, and I guess it really doesn’t matter.  I was going to a dermatologist, and she was giving me large dosages of prednisone and I was on methotrexate.  By May, I was no longer working at that resort and my skin rash was starting to go away, and she said she was trying to restart my immune system.  My goal was to get to my niece’s wedding in the beginning of June, but as I was doing that, in May or whatever, I really wasn’t feeling well.  Very fatigued, very winded, very unmotivated, very depressed and anxious.  I knew that there was more going on with me, so I had set more doctor appointments, and I wasn’t stopping.  I knew something was going on.  I just didn’t know what it was.

Bruce: So, what was the chain of events that led to a diagnosis?

Patty: The week before my niece’s wedding, the left side of my neck was all swollen and very sore.  I made an appointment the next day with my doctor, and she wanted me in for an ultrasound.  We tried to do that before I left.  I had intended to fly to Michigan.  The next day I got in there to do an ultrasound to see where the swelling was from.  When I was in there, the technician immediately called my doctor and sent me to the emergency room.  I didn’t really know what was going on, but my doctor had to wait until I got to the ER.  When I got there, it was determined I had a blood clot that went from my neck all the way down to my left hand.  Then they took some x-rays, and it showed I had a major mass in my left lung and a little bit in my right lung and they weren’t sure what that was, but they had some ideas.  I was immediately put on high doses of blood thinner, I had to spend three days in the hospital, and I had an appointment for a chest biopsy in a few days after that.  So, I went in and had the chest biopsy and I had to wait about six days.  After that was an appointment with a pulmonary oncologist on a Monday.  So, I went there, and she said there were no signs of lung cancer or any other cancers they were looking for that she would deal with, but she said it looked like lymphoma.  I was very familiar with lymphoma because I had just been through helping my dad get through with lymphoma from a few years ago and I had other people, friends that had lymphoma.  So, to me, that was sort of okay.  We got an answer and now we would be referred to another doctor in another area of the hospital. 

Bruce: And what happened next?

Patty: I met my doctor who would be treating for lymphoma and between that point and seven more weeks, I would go through a series of procedures and scans, more biopsies, bone marrow biopsies, all sorts of appointments, because, and I will go back to the skin rash, what I was being treated for with the skin rash, was high doses of prednisone, and that also treats is also part of the treatment for the mass that was my lymphoma.  They were having trouble getting a good biopsy because the mass was in bad shape.  The prednisone had been working on it, if that makes sense, so they had to find other areas where they could get a biopsy.  It took about seven weeks for them to pinpoint exactly what type of lymphoma I had, get a clean biopsy from it, clean out all the other things, get a port, get all that, and then my first chemotherapy was seven weeks after, you know, from knowing I had lymphoma.  That seven-week period was a long wait, but much went on during that time.

Bruce: The news that one has cancer is tough for all of we survivors in fact have cancer, is tough.  In your case, to some degree, you were forewarned about the possibility of lymphoma.  When you learned of your diagnosis, how did you handle it?

Patty: I was very hopeful from the very start, to tell you the truth, because all the people that I had heard about in the stories about lymphoma, were very successful, and they were living good, long lives.  For some reason, it didn’t scare me because I was familiar with it. 

Bruce: Patty, I am no doctor, and we make sure on Cancer Interviews not to be purveyors of medical advice, but upon reading up on B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma, I learned it was a very aggressive form of non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  That said, did you have  treatment options?

Patty: I am not exactly sure.  I always asked a lot of questions of my doctor and because my mass and everything was so big, he said, yes, I had had this cancer for quite a long time.  Because we were treating that debilitating body rash, that was overshadowing my cancer symptoms.  That’s what was so odd to me, you know I had two things going on, and concentrating on the one and never thinking that I had cancer, also.  My doctor was very confident, it’s like, it’s okay, this is what we are going to do, I know what to do for this.  Yes, I knew it was a large mass and I’d had it for a while, but I never once got the feeling that I wasn’t going to have a good course of treatment.

Bruce: Let’s talk about your treatment and I have two questions for you about your treatment.  First of all, you have answered this question to some degree, so some of this might be redundant and other parts we will be hearing for the first time.  Treatment for lymphoma, what did that consist of?

Patty: I knew what my dad went through and so I was sort of expecting that; but there are so many types of lymphoma, so many different kinds of treatment.  When I went in for my first infusion, my first appointment, it was on a Monday and I knew what the routine would be in the infusion center, and I was told that I would have my treatment for five days in a row, 24/7.  So, I go in on a Monday and I first have a treatment of what they call rituxan, and then they gave me a chemical cocktail, three chemicals in the cocktail in a pouch hooked up to a pump, which was attached to my port.  I went home with that bag, and it continuously dripped the treatment into me and for 23 hours the next day I went back in, the bag was empty, I got fluids and other things while I waited, and I got a new bag.  I repeated that, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday into Friday.  When I went back on Friday, the bag was empty, and I had another infusion of a chemical called cytoxan.  After that, I got to go home and the cytoxan was something that gave me the worst reaction out of all the chemicals that I had.  So, it was a rough weekend, but I had two weeks, then I would repeat that, and I would do it six times.

Bruce: It sounds like the cytoxan was the toughest part of your regimen.  Describe what was so unpleasant about taking it.

Patty: Well, cytoxan was the last thing on Friday.  I’d go home and by mid-day on Saturday, I would feel like all my glands and joints were inflamed from the bottom of my ribcage to the top of my cheekbones.  Imagine yourself having swollen glands and how sore that is; well, the whole inside of my body felt like that.  It was very hard to move, it was very hard to do anything.  It lasted for 48 hours.  On Monday morning I could feel like it was dissipating and going away.  I told my doctor this and he said there are many ways one can react from the side effects of Cytoxan, and as long as I knew that this was normal and it was okay and I wasn’t in danger from the side effects, I found ways to just get through it. 

Bruce: During a time like this for anybody on a cancer journey, it can mean a great deal to get emotional support from others.  Who provided that sort of support for you?

Patty: My husband.  Number one, absolutely.  I knew I had married a good man, but it is times like this that you just know it.  He had the best attitude, and I am sure I was very, very worried about me, but never showed it.  He was right there for all the appointments, for all the support, for all the cooking.  He made sure I was well fed.  Where he worked was very supportive, also because some days if I wasn’t feeling that well and didn’t want to be by myself, he could take the day off.  He kept busy around the house doing all these things, but he was always within earshot.  He cooked and cleaned and just was everything.  I can’t say enough.  I was very lucky.

Bruce: Your husband was a source of support, but there is an organization in the state of Vermont that may have been able to come to your aid, and that’s the Vermont Cancer Support Network.  To what degree was it of help to you?

Patty: Through the hospital, they always had people come around and make sure well taken care of, physically, mentally, spiritually, whatever, and I had gotten some material from that organization.  If I ever needed help, I could reach out to it.  In a couple years after my treatment stopped, I reached out to them because I wanted to help, also.  When I was actually going through the cancer treatments and all that, there is so much you have to keep up with.  It’s a full time job.  I was doing okay, but I knew if I needed services, I knew they were there.  I was being very taken care of, between family members, friends and that hospital staff.  I cannot say enough about my doctor and his team.  They were amazing.

Bruce: I know the answer to this, but I want to hear it in your words: Just how important is it to have a good care team?

Patty: It’s everything.  It wasn’t just about treating the medical parts and the cancer.  It was about me as a person feeling strong and confident, feeling like if anything ever happened, anybody was just a phone call away.  I had a lot of questions.  My doctor would walk into the room, and he’d have his laptop and we’d do all the initial things that we had to do and then he sat back and closed that laptop and he looked at me and he said, “Okay.  Let’s talk.  Give me your questions.  How are you feeling?”  It was like he had the whole afternoon for me, so that’s how he made me feel.  It was everyone there.  It really makes a big difference.  It is a fearful time, but the more you know, the more fear goes away.

Bruce: Now I want to get to the best part of the story because you sound and look like the picture of health. That means there must have been a point in the journey in which you felt things were turning the corner in your journey.  When was that?

Patty: I think after my first treatment as I was waiting between getting diagnosed and the seven weeks before my treatment started, I didn’t realize just how sick I was, just how all those symptoms became a norm for me.  After that first treatment, I could feel results.  With every treatment I had, with every round, the dosages would go up a little bit more until we found where my limit was, where I could handle the doses.  Every time I could feel the improvements in so many areas.

Bruce: For anyone to hear this, this is very exciting; but for you, how exciting to really feel like you were going to survive this?

Patty: I was beyond myself, really.  I lost my hair I wasn’t able to taste anything for five days the week after treatment.  You had all sorts of little things that would happen, and I just took it all in stride because I felt very positive, very confident, I felt like I was in good hands, I was feeling different, I as feeling better, everything was so well-explained to me that I am just going to do my damndest, and go forward.  I had a couple breaking points, but that’s to be expected because of lack of sleep or whatever, and you’re kinda quarantined.  Friends, they were supportive in different ways and every little thing like that meant the world to me.  I knew that people were thinking of me.

Bruce: Excellent, Patty.  Finally, let’s imagine you encountered someone who encountered someone who had just been diagnosed with lymphoma and you had a chance to speak to them one-on-one.  If there is any part of your message that would be most important of all, what would it be?

Patty: Find out everything that you can.  Don’t be afraid to ask questions.  Don’t be afraid to find the doctor and the medical team and the support staff that’s going to help you in all the different ways that you need.  Don’t let knowledge overtake what’s going on, because the more you know, the more you learn.  It just gives fear nowhere to go.  You only get stronger.  That’s why sharing stories is so important because sometimes I go along and might mention something about cancer and someone will say, “Did you have cancer?”  I will say that I did and the more I can talk about it, the more the person relaxes, the more I can talk about this, the more I know I have made a difference in some people’s lives because they have heard me talk about it.  No matter what the outcome, you just have to do the best you can and believe in your team and just try to put that fear away.  That’s a hard thing to do.

Bruce: Patty, at the top of the show we referenced your story as one could provide information and inspiration, and I believe your story has checked both boxes in a very big way.  Patty, thanks very much for sharing your story with us, thanks for being with us on Cancer Interviews.

Patty: Thank you.

Bruce: That is going to wrap up this segment of Cancer Interviews, and as always, we remind you, if you or a loved one are on a cancer journey, you are not alone.  There are lots of people out there just like Patty, who can make that journey a little bit easier.  So, until next time, we’ll see you on down the road.

Additional Resources:

Cancer Interviews: www.cancerinterviews.com

Vermont Cancer Support Network: www.info@vcsn.net

SHOW NOTES

TITLE: Patty Pittala, B-cell Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma Survivor – Westford, Vermont, USA

What began as a severe skin rash for Patty Pittala became a diagnosis of B-cell non-Hodgkin lymphoma.  Thanks to a positive, proactive attitude, and a no-nonsense treatment regimen, Patty attained survivorship.  She enjoys a healthy lifestyle that includes her taking up kayaking.  She shares her story with the @CancerInterviews podcast.

Additional Resources:

Cancer Interviews: www.cancerinterviews.com

Vermont Cancer Support Network: www.info@vcsn.net

Team Stamps:

03:28 Patty started noticing “subtle health challenges,” including a severe skin rash.

06:04 Explains what led to her cancer diagnosis.

08:50 Describes her treatment regimen.

10:44 Patty reveals how she handled news of her diagnosis.

11:45 Explains why her cancer symptoms were not spotted right away.

12:57 Said she was mentally prepared for the challenge of her treatment regimen.

15:13 Describes the role Cytoxan played in her regimen.

16:38 Said throughout the journey she received tremendous, tireless support from her husband.

19:45 Patty talks about the importance of having a good care team.

21:50 She was excited to realize she was on the road to recovery.

KEYWORDS (tags):

cancer

lymphoma

cancerinterviews.com

blood thinner

chemotherapy

bruce morton

prednisone

rituxan

patty pittala

cytoxan

chemo

methotrexate