Anyway, I had about eleven months of remission which is right on the border of being good/bad. Making it to 12 months without a remission is a better prognosis, but I moved up my CT scan so that's why I keep telling myself that I made it over the hump into 12 month land before the Hodgkin's part two was caught.

My second time with Hodgkin's was diagnosed in December 2003, and the only real treatment option was a bone marrow transplant. I chose the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, WA because they were awesome. My family had to move up to Seattle for about three months, and coordinating someone to be with me for 24 hours a day was pretty difficult. At the Hutch, patients live in specialized housing which is an apartment building just for bone marrow transplant patients right next to the Hospital. The patients can't be left alone, though, for obvious reasons, so we had to line up someone to be with me all the time. My husband had health insurance (and our only paycheck at that time), so he had to keep working in Portland three or four days a week. It must have been really tough on him, I would cry and get really upset when he had to leave me in Seattle but he was doing what he had to do for both of us. His sister, Lee, took care of me for most of the time and she is an awesome, awesome girl. She's an Aquarian just like me, and we called ourselves the "Dolphin twins". We did dolphin puzzles, and she bought us both matching dolphin necklaces to keep us thinking about the ocean. She watched surf videos with me every day, and would buy me surf magazines and chat surf just trying to get me to talk. She was awesome, and someday I hope I can take her to Hawaii to say thank you, and to teach her to surf.

The bone marrow transplant went really well, as far as transplants go, and only had a few really scary moments. I blacked out during radiation, and that caused the whole hospital to come running and really worried my family. And then they couldn't get the central lines out, and to avoid scaring other people with central lines we'll just omit that whole removal process because what happened to me was fairly rare. But it did leave some good scars on my right breast which people usually stare at when I'm in a bikini on the beach. Central lines are really common, and many people have them and just don't talk about them.

Read more about Pamela on the Seattle Cancer Care Alliance web site. She's also featured in the 2007 Calendar of the Bone and Marrow Transplant Information Network.

Photos by Erik Aeder