My diagnosis

I am starting a blog to hopefully not only help myself through this battle I'm facing, but to also encourage others and simply keep people updated on my journey. Stay tuned...I hope you learn something!!
So here we go......

If you don't know me, my name is Kendall and I am 24 years old. I have been blissfully married for a year and a half to my best friend, Brett. We did not expect to face such a huge challenge so early on in marriage, and by far this is the biggest and scariest I could ever imagine.

I have been diagnosed with Primary Mediastinal B-Cell Lymphoma, a form of Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma.

I began having symptoms like fatigue and feeling generally unwell for a few weeks, then began some other symptoms like swelling in my neck and face, pressure in my head when I lent forward and prominant veins showing on my chest and in my arms.

After a lot of mucking around, working in the hospital system as a nurse and just generally being thrown around places, I had a CT scan which confirmed a mass growing in my chest completely obstructing my superior vena cava (the part of the heart that receives blood back from the head etc). Things then moved really quickly to appointments and tests and a biopsy to confirm the diagnosis.

Our future fertility is something that I always thought about (even before being diagnosed with lymphoma). I've always wanted kids and to have a family, so as soon as we found out about this that was one of our first appointments.  We went through options and seemed confident we could harvest some eggs and hubby's sperm and make embryos, to then have frozen for when we needed them. Unfortunately my haematologist said he didn't want to delay treatment, due to the risk the mass could potentially have on my health. It was fine at the time as we were also informed that the treatment planned had only a 3.9% chance of causing infertility. We thought that was ok and decided to go ahead with treatment. The next lot of news we received was after the biopsy, which confirmed non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, which then needed a different type of chemotherapy treatment. This one doesn't have any specific statistics in terms of fertility, so as you can imagine, I am battling to come to terms with maybe the fact we won't have kids. Thankfully we have a faith in our great God, who we believe can work miracles and so if It is in His plan for us to have children after all of this, then we would be so so happy. All we can do is pray and have faith that we will be provided with the gift of being able to have a little family of our own.

It is so hard at the moment to see God's plan in all of this, and of course the uncertainty, fear, doubt, negative thoughts and everything else pile into my mind and distract me from what I truly believe. I ask that you pray for us. Particularly me, who seems to want to give up already and am too scared to go through what I need to, to get better. I'm being raw and honest. I'm not going to pretend I have it all together and that I am happy all the time. So many tears have been shed and I know there's many more to come.

Join me on this journey, this battle, this faith testing challenge.