Thanh-Lan Thi Sena will be graduating this fall with her master’s degree in public administration, despite the hardships she has faced dealing with cancer. As it turned out, her battle could have, and should have, started much earlier than it did.
Born and raised in Albuquerque, the cancer survivor was diagnosed with stage four Hodgkin’s Lymphoma in 2011 while attending UNM.
Sena described Hodgkin’s Lymphoma as a twin to Leukemia.
“Lymphoma is a type of white blood cell cancer, and Leukemia is a red blood cell cancer,” she said.
Having no intense symptoms, Sena said the only thing she had was a persistent cough, which was initially misdiagnosed as asthma by her doctor. She knew that couldn’t be right.
“I had no history of asthma in my family,” she said. “I knew that there was something wrong and I knew that the diagnoses wasn’t right because all of my medications and inhalers weren’t working.”
A year later, after switching healthcare providers, Sena, after having trouble breathing, was admitted to the emergency room, where her condition was again treated like asthma. However, she said her husband demanded a chest x-ray.
“Being told it was asthma, I had never had any tests nor chest x-rays,” she said. “The emergency room physician told me that 90 percent of my lungs were covered in tumors and my lymph nodes were over a hundred times bigger than they should be.”
Sena said that it was a process to decipher whether her condition was Hodgkin’s Lymphoma or not, due the rarity of the cancer being found in her lungs.
“I did six months of chemotherapy,” she said. “After a year of being absent, I went back to school.”
Sena said she originally planned to go to medical school to become a doctor. However, she realized after returning that she had a passion for something much different — political science.
Two years after her diagnosis, in December of 2013, she achieved her bachelor’s degree in the field.
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A month later, Sena found out her cancer returned. This time, she would have to get a bone marrow transplant.
“In January we started a different type of chemotherapy,” she said.
Sena explained that her oncologists suggested a drug, Brentuximab, as an alternative to chemotherapy.
“While on that drug, I had no symptoms. I was functioning, I didn’t lose my hair and I didn’t feel nauseated,” she said. “The drug did not have a lot of side effects like other chemotherapies did.”
By May, Sena said she left to Colorado for a bone marrow transplant where they harvested her own bone marrow in one day and gave her chemotherapy for a week.
Things then took a turn for the worse.
“They gave me a type of antibiotic, because I was exhibiting symptoms of an infection,” she said. “It turns out I was allergic and I had fevers of 107 degrees.”
She explained that along with her allergy, the problems did not stop there. One of her lungs collapsed due to blood clots and her gallbladder had to be removed, resulting in internal bleeding afterward.
“I had so many challenges along the way,” she said. “Typically people don’t stay in the hospital after a transplant for very long, but I was in the hospital from May to July.”
After she returned home, Sena said that after she was able to go home it took six months for her to regain strength.
“I was not even able to climb stairs then,” she said. “Within seven months I was horseback riding.”
A year after her transplant, Sena said that she applied for her master’s program and decided she had a passion for studying health policy — an interest with roots in her experience with cancer.
“I felt that I wanted to do more in health policy to prevent misdiagnoses, and so I got my master’s in health administration so I can prevent what happened to me,” she said.
Sena said she always loved school, and is now striving to apply for law school to continue her studies.
“As soon as I got the okay from my physicians, I jumped right back into school,” she said. “I think going back to school the second time around was a little bit difficult, but I was in something that I really enjoyed, so I pushed myself to keep going and take my time.”
Sena said that, while everyone has different battles in life, they shouldn’t be cynical about them.
“For other students who are overwhelmed with course work or even personal challenges, take things one at time,” she said. “That challenge and struggle is going to help you in the long run, I know it certainly did for me.”
Megan Nyce is a news reporter at the Daily Lobo. She can be reached at news@dailylobo.com or on Twitter @Megznham.
