"Let's Do It"
Weldon, stunned into a daze, walked home from the hospital alone, trying to understand what he had just learned, thinking also of his mother, who had died of lung cancer five years earlier. "At some point during this kind of event, it's natural to ask, 'Why me?'" he notes. "But I quickly realized that asking that sort of question wouldn't do me any good. I had cancer, and I decided I needed to focus everything I had on overcoming it." Weldon had cancer and he was going to have to beat it. 'Let's do it,' he told himself during the walk home.
Weldon then contacted his father, stepmother, and sister, who lived in California, to give them the bad news. Knowing that the real battle would begin the very next day, he stayed up late that night, watching movies, trying to clear his head.
At six a.m. the following morning, he went into the hospital for a spinal tap, a bone marrow drill, and another biopsy of the lymph node. He also met Tanya Trippett, MD, Chief of the Pediatric Lymphoma Service at Memorial Sloan-Kettering and the woman who, as Weldon says in retrospect, saved his life.
"Dr. Trippett was extremely nice, right from the start," he says. "I knew nothing about lymphoma at the time, so she walked me through what we were going to do to find out exactly what type of lymphoma it was, and then how we would treat it." When the tests came back, they showed that Weldon had stage III Burkitt's lymphoma, a highly aggressive form of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Weldon's father, who flew back to New York the day after the bad news was delivered, gave Weldon a good piece of advice, telling him to view his cancer treatment as "pushing the pause button on the rest of his life." Weldon explains: "He said to hit the pause button, to take care of whatever is necessary to beat the cancer. Then, once that's done, hit the play button to resume the rest of my life."
Two days later, after PET (positron emission tomography) and CT (computed tomography) scans, it was discovered that in addition to the tumor in his groin, Weldon had a tumor in one lung and another growing against his trachea. The cancer was so aggressive that Dr. Trippett had Weldon start his first chemotherapy treatment session on Saturday of that same week.
No Gown Required
Weldon made a point at that first session not to wear a hospital gown, remaining in his "street" clothes -- something he did throughout his entire treatment. "It might be a little stubborn and strange," he explains, "but to me wearing a hospital gown meant that I was giving in somehow to the disease. And I wasn't about to do that."
The chemotherapy regimen would last three months, from May to the end of August. Weldon found that the days on which he received the chemotherapy treatments were not as bad as he'd expected, but that the week following the treatments proved to be the most difficult part of the process. It was during these times that he had to deal with treatment-induced exhaustion, mouth sores from the toxic chemicals, and nausea -- though that was largely controlled by a new generation of powerful antinausea drugs. Additionally, early on in Weldon's chemotherapy regimen, a fellow patient gave him some practical guidance. "He told me that whenever I started feeling nauseous, I should go ahead and throw up, which would make me feel better. That turned out to be great advice."
As is often the case with lymphoma treatment, Weldon's chemotherapy regimen included the use of a steroid known as prednisolone, which has been shown to help kill lymphocytes, the blood cells that give rise to lymphomas. Unfortunately, one of the side effects of this type of steroid is that it greatly increases one's appetite. "That was the one of the worst parts," Weldon says, vividly remembering the feeling. "It makes you ravenously hungry -- so hungry that it's actually painful."
To help deal with this new regimen in his life, he came up with a number of coping mechanisms, including befriending many nurses in the Pediatric Day Hospital and watching The Price is Right on a daily basis.
