Life With Non-Hodgkin's Lymph... Video Transcript

Webcast Transcript

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ANNOUNCER: With this new course of therapy, Eileen did experience a temporary lowering of her white blood count. But as her doctors had predicted, after six weeks or so, levels returned to normal. It was just in time for Eileen to oversee the medieval festival on which she works tirelessly.

EILEEN MERLE-RAO: The fact that I was there and I had gotten all the work done was amazing to me, that I had gotten it all done while in treatment.

I pretty much didn't have a life on the chemotherapy, and I actually could have some sort of life with the radiation. And that was exciting.

ANNOUNCER: The success rate of radioimmunotherapy for people like Eileen is promising.

STEPHEN SCHUSTER, MD: In the patients that were used in the early clinical trials, these were patients that received radioimmunotherapy after having had multiple prior therapies that either worked for a period of time and then failed or failed altogether. And quite remarkably, overall response rates to the radioimmunotherapy were about 70 percent in patients that had failed their preceding therapy. And I think that that's impressive for a group of patients who've failed multiple prior therapies.

ANNOUNCER: Eileen and her doctors were certainly pleased with her results.

EILEEN MERLE-RAO: Both my oncologist and the nuclear medical doctor were very, very pleased with the results. There were still a few lymph nodes which were enlarged, but they'd already been through cancer. This could be scar tissue. It was not necessarily the cancer.

ANNOUNCER: Eileen had had little hope for keeping her disease at bay, but now her attitude has changed.

EILEEN MERLE-RAO: Now that I've gone through the radioimmunotherapy, I have a tendency to be more hopeful that the cancer won't come back. I am definitely hopeful that it will keep it away, if not indefinitely, then definitely for longer periods of time. So I won't have to come in every three years for an oil change and a tune-up.

ANNOUNCER: And while Eileen's life was once on hold, now she sees a future filled with possibility.

EILEEN MERLE-RAO: We froze seven embryos shortly after we got married before the chemotherapy, and so I still have hopes of having a family. I would really like to get my singing career back together. I enjoy directing, but I would really like to get my singing career and my acting career back together.

Now I can understand how some people can go through cancer treatments and still have a life.

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