my story
By Brandon Klein
Editor’s Note: “My Story” is a first-person column OR a Q&A feature of a New Albany community member that centers on health. Have a story to share? Email bklein@cityscenemediagroup.com. Submissions should be no more than 1,000 words.
A Beast of a Disease Cancer diagnosis doesn’t keep theater director down
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I called my general practitioner and they set an appointment for me in October and said, let’s go ahead and get a CT scan. I went in for the scan and then, a few days later, I got a call from my doctor and that’s when he told me that I had this lymphoma growing in my back, or what he perceived to be lymphoma from the CT scan. So he referred me to (The Ohio State University James Cancer Hospital). They were able to pinpoint exactly what it was and it’s pretty incredible how specific they can be in their diagnosis. Once they made the diagnosis my oncologists said they want to get me in for chemotherapy next week, which was the holidays and I was like, ‘Can we wait until at least after Christmas?’ And he said, ‘That’s fine, but we do need to get you in soon because it’s stage four and it’s rapidly growing.’ HNA: What was your reaction to the diagnosis? EL: I think whenever anyone hears stage four related to cancer it chills their blood a bit and, certainly, there was that initial fear. You start to do a little bit of soul-searching at that moment as well, but I was able to reframe my mindset 8
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Photos courtesy of Elliott Lemberg
lliott Lemberg is the artistic director at the New Albany High School theater department. He was diagnosed with diffuse large B-cell non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, stage four, in December 2019. The disease kept him on medical leave for the remainder of that school year. His interview with Health New Albany magazine was edited for space and clarity. HNA: What was life like before your diagnosis and when did you start noticing something different was going on in your life? EL: Regarding life before the diagnosis, it’s always been very busy. Running the theater program and teaching consumes a lot of my time. In 2019 we were invited to be a part of the American High School Theatre Festival in Edinburgh, held during the Fringe Festival. We took a production called Pippin over to Edinburgh and performed in August of that year. The trip butted right up to the start of the year. Two days later, I just couldn’t get my legs back underneath me. I was just exhausted. This went on for weeks. Then I started to have some back pain as well. I’ve had kidney stones since 2006 so I thought it was one of my kidney stones acting up, but the pain was persistent. It wasn’t going away. And the fatigue wasn’t really going away no matter how long I slept.
