Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Hodgkin's Lymphoma (lymph nodes)

What will you do when someone close to you like your boss telling you that he have illness such as cancer? What will be your reaction? how will you comfort him? What will you do to show that you're concern?


My boss just celebrated his 54 birthday last month and its really a shocked to hear that he have cancer, coz he look fine and healthy.

The cancer he having is at 3rd stage. He said to me "it was not bad", 3rd stage is not that bad. Hmm... do i trust his words? NOPE, I know he is worried, it show on his face. How can I help him, how can I show to him that I care of what happening to him?

I really don't know how to react and how to help him to ease his pain, I really don't know what to expect when he will start doing his chemotherapy. I know it will not be easy, chemotherapy itself its pain.

I pray that GOD will give him courage to continue and fight for his life. I feel really sad. I will do my best to help him in office matter.

Now, I know why that he always having back pain and lately he was suffering badly, it was actually the symptom of cancer. The result report mentioned about "Hodgkin's Lymphoma (lymph nodes). I read the report and I surfed the net to find what it said about "Hodgkin's Lymphoma".

Symptoms

Patients with Hodgkin's lymphoma may present with the following symptoms:

  • Night Sweats
  • Lymph nodes: the most common symptom of Hodgkin's is the painless enlargement of one or more lymph nodes. The nodes may also feel rubbery and swollen when examined by a physician. The nodes of the neck and shoulders (cervical and supraclavicular) are most frequently involved (80-90% of the time, on average). The lymph nodes of the chest are often affected and these may be noticed on a chest radiograph.
  • Splenomegaly: enlargement of the spleen occurs in about 30% of people with Hodgkin's lymphoma. The enlargement, however, is seldom massive and the size of the spleen may fluctuate during the course of treatment.[6]
  • Hepatomegaly: enlargement of the liver, due to liver involvement, is present in about five percent of cases.
  • Hepatosplenomegaly: the enlargement of both the liver and spleen caused by the same disease.
  • Pain:
    • Pain following alcohol consumption: classically, involved nodes are painful after alcohol consumption, though this phenomenon is rare[7].
    • Back pain: nonspecific back pain (pain that cannot be localized or its cause determined by examination or scanning techniques) has been reported in some cases of Hodgkin's lymphoma.
  • Systemic symptoms: about one-third (⅓) of patients with Hodgkin's disease may also present with systemic symptoms, including low-grade fever; night sweats; unexplained weight loss of at least 10% of the patient's total body mass in six months or less, itchy skin (pruritus) due to increased levels of eosinophils in the bloodstream; or fatigueB symptoms; thus, presence of fever, weight loss, and night sweats indicate that the patient's stage is, for example, 2B instead of 2A[8]. (lassitude). Systemic symptoms such as fever, night sweats, and weight loss are known as
  • Cyclical fever: patients may also present with a cyclical high-grade fever known as the Pel-Ebstein fever[9], or more simply "P-E fever". However, there is debate as to whether or not the P-E fever truly exists

Lymphadenopathy is a term meaning "disease of the lymph nodes." It is, however, almost synonymously used with "swollen/enlarged lymph nodes"

About Lymphoma
Lymphoma is a general term for a group of cancers that originate in the lymphatic system. The lymphomas are divided into two major categories: Hodgkin lymphoma and all other lymphomas, called non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL). The prefix "lymph-" indicates their origin in the malignant change of a lymphocyte and the suffix "-oma" is derived from the Greek suffix denoting "tumor." About 53 percent of the blood cancers that occur each year are lymphoma.

Hodgkin lymphoma was named for Thomas Hodgkin, an English physician who described several cases of the disease in 1832. Hodgkin lymphoma will represent about 11.1 percent of all lymphomas diagnosed in 2008.

About 74,340 Americans will be diagnosed with lymphoma in 2008. This figure includes approximately 8,220 new cases of Hodgkin lymphoma (4,400 males and 3,820 females), and 66,120 new cases of NHL (35,450 males and 30,670 females).

Lymphoma results when a lymphocyte (a type of white blood cell) undergoes a malignant change and begins to multiply, eventually crowding out healthy cells and creating tumors that enlarge the lymph nodes or other parts of the immune system.

Lymphoma generally starts in lymph nodes or collections of lymphatic tissue in organs like the stomach or intestines. It may involve the marrow and the blood in some cases. Lymphoma may spread from one site to other parts of the body. Lymphocytic leukemias originate and are most prominent in the marrow and spill over into the blood. They occasionally spread to involve the lymph nodes.

Here are the following link.

http://www.leukemia-lymphoma.org/attachments/National/br_1215006541.pdf

http://www.leukemia-lymphoma.org/all_page?item_id=7030

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hodgkin_disease

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lymphadenopathy

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