William Y., Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL)

“Before you get the cells infused in CAR T-cell therapy, they start you on four days of chemo and then you have one day of rest before infusion. The four days of chemo are Fludarabine and Cytoxan.

During the rest day, you get prophylactic medicine, immunoglobulin, and some sort of anti-fungal. That day isn’t bad at all. You just get to chill out. The chemo gave me heavy loss of appetite, but that was it.”

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Tina C., Breast Cancer

“I did four rounds of Cytoxan and Adriamycin.

I had really bad nausea. First time I did the Adriamycin-Cytoxan I went in, probably administered about 10 or 11 in the morning. By the time I got home it was early afternoon and by 4 that afternoon I just felt horrible. It felt like a hangover and you had no idea when or if you were going to throw up, but you just felt you were going to throw up. I felt that way probably for three days.

My smells were really heightened to me. My cousin was there and she was making pancakes and I didn’t even know pancakes had a smell, but it was  the most horrible smell ever. I was taking the anti-nausea meds that they gave me, but it was almost like I was behind and I could never get ahead.

And I am always hungry, but I had no hunger. For me to eat maybe a teaspoon of Cream of Wheat and maybe a cracker in a day was enough. I had to force myself to even do that.”

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Arielle R., Non-Hodgkin Lymphoma, Primary Mediastinal (PMBCL)

“I was getting so sick, not oxygenating and all these things, so they needed to give me a round of chemo to start. Before we even had the full diagnosis they gave me two baby doses of Cytoxan which is kind of an evil chemotherapy.

It’s very harsh, very old, makes your hair fall out immediately.  Then we found out what my diagnosis was and I did a full round of what my treatment would be which was six cycles of dose-adjusted R-EPOCH.”

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