Patrick Betters…makes things “Better” for kids!
At 16 years old I was a varsity wrestling team captain, at 17 years old I was a cancer patient. Three days after my seventeenth birthday I was diagnosed with Non-Hodgkins T-Cell Lymphoma. September 18th, 2006 I awoke to an inability to breathe. A few hours later, I awoke to the site of my mother’s distraught face; crying her eyes out, I knew something was wrong. Cancer was the term that stuck. For the next few months I had routine hospital appointments and a couple two to three week hospital stays for chemo. Things started to seem very routine, until Thanksgiving came. Thanksgiving day I could not eat a thing, my body just couldn’t handle any food and I knew something was wrong. The day after Thanksgiving I thought I had a normal hospital check up; I was wrong. As I got out of the car I fell to the ground, as far as I can remember I was unconscious.
The next thing I remember is waking up in a hospital bed, five nurses around me, my doctor right next to me and my temperature was over 105 and my blood pressure was dropping dramatically. That night I ended up in the ICU with a heated blanket, a heat lamp, the temperature of the room increased, and I was still having the chills. The doctors suspected that it was the end, not sure if I would make it through the night. That week I had a lung biopsy done because they found something inside my lungs; mucor. Mucor is a fungal infection that they hadn’t seen in over five years, which I later found out also had never had any survivors from the infection. My doctor suddenly felt immense pressure to find a way, so she called specialists all around the country until they finally found a medicine that wasn’t yet available to the market. It took two and a half months, the day after Thanksgiving through Christmas and New Years, but I was able to go home. The stays in the hospital continued with the chemotherapy and the fungal medication, but on January 23rd 2009, I was pronounced in remission.
Patrick is a summer intern at the Jessie Rees Foundation and is truly making things “better” for kids fighting cancer. Â He inspires us in so many ways.