Joseph R’s Immunotherapy Story

For about five years, from 2007-2012, I was doing chemotherapy treatments and clinical trials at West Penn Hospital in Pittsburgh, PA, and it just wasn’t curing it. So my oncologist, Dr. Antonios Christou, recommended that I go to a bigger facility. That’s what brought me to Johns Hopkins Hospital, and to Dr. Leisha Emens.

It wasn’t what I had initially expected. I thought it would be a series of injections, but instead it was an infusion. I would lie in the Clinical Research Center at UCLA, and they would infuse me over a period of five hours. When the infusion was complete, the nurses would come and check my vital signs every 15 minutes for the next five hours. It was like a 10-hour day. That was the first week of January of 2004.

When I went back after two weeks, I was in Dr. Ribas’s office, and I had on one of those examination gowns. Dr. Ribas started to examine me and he said, “My God.” And I said, “What?” And he said, “Those lesions… they’re gone.” I looked at my arm and shoulder and I hadn’t even noticed they weren’t there anymore. “Oh my God, this is gonna work!” he said. “This is gonna work!” “Yeah, yeah, whatever,” I replied—because at this point I was still very sick, very weak, and feeling skeptical.

Over the next two or three months, I started feeling better. I started eating again. I started putting on a little bit of weight. I think I gained 30 pounds in three months. That was a lot considering I only weighed 92 pounds by that point. I was basically a 6’4” skeleton of skin and bones.

Well, it’s like I got a second chance at life. Before I got sick, I had just completed my post-Master’s hours in clinical psychology and was working towards becoming a licensed marriage and family therapist. I worked really hard to get all these hours, and I was doing it on top of working full-time as an accountant and a teacher. And then I got very sick, and basically I lost all the hours that I invested. But then I got the immunotherapy and I got better, and I had to decide in my late 40s, okay, what am I going to do with my life?
 
In 2010, I registered for school and started a doctoral program in psychology. I’ll be starting my last year in the program this fall. I am within reach of obtaining a lifelong goal of earning a doctoral degree and eventually becoming a licensed clinical psychologist. That’s something I never could have imagined 12 years ago when I was so sick and fighting for my life.