Wairarapa’s locally owned community newspaper
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 7, 2018
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The battle is over Emily Ireland Featherston mum Jen Bhati has been through the ringer with her cancer battle. But after two years of fighting, her doctor has finally dropped the ‘r’ word – remission. Jen, 40, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in September 2016 – it was the latest in a string of cancer diagnoses in her family. In December 2015, her niece who was 18 months old was diagnosed with neuroblastoma – there was a tumour wrapped around her kidney. The day her niece was given the “six week all-clear” after treatment, Jen’s mother was diagnosed with lymphoma – she had a tumour wrapped around her spine, but she is now also in remission And while her mother’s cancer was being treated, that’s when Jen herself was diagnosed with the same cancer, Stage 3 non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Jen went through chemotherapy and finished her treatment in April 2017. But by the time December came by, Jen felt that something was wrong again. Her cancer relapse was confirmed midFebruary this year, and treatment began again in mid-March. “The oncologist pretty much said, ‘we’re going to be spending a lot of money on you’,” Jen said. “They had a treatment plan already laid out as to what they were going to do.” This included further chemotherapy, and
stem cell transplant therapy. “There were six rounds of chemo this time around — once every three weeks, and it was a four-day hospital stay each time.” During these chemotherapy sessions, Jen’s stem cells were harvested for a later transplant. Once the harvest day came around, Jen had to lay in hospital for five hours while a “big dialysis-like machine” her took blood. About six weeks after her last chemotherapy session she was admitted back into hospital to start the chemotherapy again — six days’ worth — in preparation for the stem cell transplant. “The transplant day came, and I was pretty psyched for it. “They had my bag of stem cells, they brought it from the blood centre where it had been in a freezer, and the moment they put it in a water bath to defrost, they had 10 minutes to get it into me. “It was very quick, and I was thinking, wow was that it? “And that was it.” A few days passed and then “it went hell in a handbasket”.
Living with Cancer
Continued on page 3 Jen Bhati, Featherston. PHOTO/EMILY IRELAND