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My Answer to Cancer
Patient Profile: Hillary Waterman
Posted Date: 8/19/2005
It was amazing. The mass was completely gone. There was nothing left, not even scar tissue. It was the best case scenario..
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Hillary Waterman is an active, 26-year-old interior designer. She practices yoga, enjoys boating and spending time with family and friends. She’s always been in good physical condition, so when she developed a “tight” feeling in her chest in early 2004, she didn’t give it much thought.
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Hillary Waterman
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“My job is fairly demanding so I just thought it was stress,” she said. “But when I came home from work one day and put on a t-shirt, I realized that my left arm was swollen,” she says.
Hillary was concerned and quickly took herself to the emergency room of a hospital near her home in Rochester, Mich. An emergency physician examined her but couldn’t explain the swelling.
For the next few weeks, she saw other doctors. Her primary care physician said it was probably just a pulled muscle from a recent day of wakeboarding. Hillary was not convinced.
“To be honest, I’m a bit of a hypochondriac,” she says. “I usually think something’s wrong and it turns out to be nothing.”
But this time Hillary wasn’t wrong. When she requested a CT scan, her physician quickly identified the problem. A large mass above her heart was blocking a vein and causing the swelling. The mass proved to be Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Based on the recommendation of a friend, Hillary called Karmanos Cancer Institute in Detroit – a nationally recognized cancer hospital where multidisciplinary teams of specialists review each patient’s case. She was impressed that she was able to schedule an initial appointment with one of the Institute’s lymphoma specialists – Jeffrey Zonder, M.D. – within a week of her call.
“I called and it was very easy to set up an appointment,” she says. “And I immediately loved Dr. Zonder. Even when I knew he was busy, he took time to explain everything to me.”
That was important because Hillary was entering one of the most challenging periods of her life. In the summer of 2004, she started 16 weeks of chemotherapy at Karmanos Cancer Institute. She met many “fantastic nurses” during those weeks – people she says would “do anything for you.”
At the end of her chemo, Dr. Zonder ordered a series of scans to determine the size of the mass.
“It was amazing. The mass was completely gone. There was nothing left, not even scar tissue. It was the best case scenario,” Hillary says. “I was so excited by the news – I was on top of the world. My mother was with me for that appointment and we both started crying when we heard it was gone.”
To maximize the chances of curing the lymphoma, Dr. Zonder and Jeffrey Forman, M.D. – an expert radiologist at Karmanos Cancer Institute – completed Hillary’s treatment protocol with 20 days of radiation therapy at Karmanos Cancer Institute’s Weisberg Cancer Center in Farmington Hills, Mich.
“I expected it to be harder than it was – the chemo and the radiation,” Hillary says. “But it really wasn’t that tough.”
Today Hillary lives on a lake in Linden, Mich. and feels great knowing that she’s healthy again. But, in truth, she says she never really felt ill.
“That’s probably the scariest thing. I never felt like I was sick. If the mass hadn’t been exactly where it was, I don’t know how long it would have taken for me to notice something,” she says. “I guess I’m just lucky I found it when I did.”
And, she says, she’s lucky she found Drs. Zonder and Forman and all the dedicated people at Karmanos Cancer Institute.
 
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