Diagnosis Day: “Mostly What I Heard Was Cancer”

David Hollier: Yeah. Mostly what I heard was “cancer”. It’s a form of cancer. And I had no understanding about leukemia, really. The chronic part didn’t really click, other than him explaining that there are acute forms and then there are chronic forms, and they all typically must be treated. He did explain that the chronic one—I don’t know, I hear this a lot with different doctors—when you have something, they say, “Well, if you’re going to have this, this is the one you want to have.” I got that speech. So it’s like, “Oh, well, can I have option five…instead of one, two, three or four, could I have option five, please?”

David was diagnosed with CLL (chronic lymphocytic leukemia) by his primary care doctor over a decade ago.

David Hollier: I got a pamphlet. It’s like, oh, no, no, no, I need more info. I need more data, more…what does this mean, life expectancy, all these things. I started looking up a bunch of things. But my first task was to go home and tell my husband. And he was still at work, so I waited until he came home. And gosh, it was…he was in shock. He just, like, “There’s no way. You’re the healthiest person I know.” And both of us just couldn’t wrap our heads around how can this be a thing for us. So, we were very upset for the weekend, for at least several days after that. And we both did our homework, trying to figure this out. What are we going to do? How’s this going to affect my work?

We just went through all those questions and tried to figure out, so what does this mean? And of course, I had not yet seen the oncologist to get the real information about it. And we had done some exploration on the web, kind of thing. But once I went in to see the oncologist, that helped because he really explained things a lot better about, well, we’re going to wait and watch for a while and see, kind of track the progression of it—how fast, how aggressive, what’s your white blood cell count doing? Is it doubling, is it tripling, quadrupling, so forth? So he explained all of those realities to me, which really helped.

So, it took almost a year for my first treatment because it was pretty aggressive in terms of its exponential increasing of the white blood cells. But there wasn’t like a support group or anything that we would meet in Austin, but there was the mentoring program. So I did contact a mentor who had what I have. And that’s one of the disconcerting things, was that, “Oh, I’ve had it for seven years”—and he was like 10 years older than me—”I’ve had it for seven years so far, and I’ve never had to have treatment.” So you see, my one and only contact with a real CLL person, his deal was no.

And I just talked to him a few months ago, matter of fact. And he still…it’s been now, oh gosh, over 10 years or 12 years, and still, no treatment. My first treatment, I was really, really scared because movies and stories about chemotherapy, and what people go through, and how they feel, and the sickness, and the vomiting, and the nausea, and…man, my head was filled with all of the worst images about it. And so, I went with fear and trepidation for sure. But my husband, Tim, was there with me that first go-around. And we were together going through it. And yeah, it was really bad, but I think I had overblown images of how bad it was or was going to be.

But make no mistake about it, I was very sick because I had six months...every 28 days, I had the IV form of chemotherapy for CLL. When I was feeling better, it was time for another treatment, so that was hard to be hit every 28 days. So the recovery time wasn’t enough. I wish they could have said, “Okay, we’ll skip a month here, so give you more time to recover.” I wanted more time to recover between the treatments because I felt so horrible. But that was kind of my deal about it.