Caleb’s Story

Site created on December 16, 2007

Welcome to Caleb's blog. We'll try to keep everybody updated on how he is doing via this website. He may not be able/want to write on it much personally, but I (Cora-Anne Lawrence) will hopefully be able to do it when I am at home.

Caleb was diagnosed with Hodgkin's Lymphoma in March '07. He went through ~6 months of chemotherapy shortly after (AVBD).

At his follow up appointment in December '07, it was discovered there was a relapse. New cancer cells had appeared in his chest.He received an autologous stem cell transplant starting Jan 23, 2008.

In May 2008, Caleb was given a clean bill of health...the cancer was all gone. We were ecstatic and felt like we could really live our lives again. It had been a big journey for the past year and a bit. From cancer stuff, the birth of Owen and our miscarriage early in Jan '08 when Caleb was being admitted for his auto transplant.

Unfortunately, in Sept 2008, Caleb noticed his back pain coming back after having a couple beers while on his hunting trip. It was confirmed in Oct that he indeed had a 2nd relapse. There were cancer cells in his back, lymph nodes and his lungs.

He underwent 5 more chemotherapies and his tumors weren't really responding by shrinking as much as they had hoped. His doctor had suggested an allogeneic transplant after bringing up a good chemo drug from the United States and trying another chemo not normally used for Hodgkins.

Caleb had his allo transplant December 2013, with a 10/10 match!

Relapsed again April 2016. Going to have radiation and try a new immunotherapy drug called Nivolumab and possibly have donor lymphocyte infusion.

Hopefully we can get some good results from that! We feel so lucky to have all the love and support from our family and friends...and even people who've never met us! We are so blessed to have our 2 beautiful children, they are the sunshine in our lives!

Newest Update

Journal entry by Cora-Anne Lawrence

Ha...I totally forgot to update after Caleb's last doctor's appointment.

Everything went well. Still putting a hiatus on immunotherapy. Next scheduled appointment is end of January.

Caleb has been feeling pretty good. He's been out hunting since last month and Owen even went a couple weekends for archery. So far all he's brought home is a duck. That was from an organized hunt that a fellow hockey dad invited him out to. He was out yesterday for a day hunt and will go out again tomorrow. The trailer got winterized this past weekend before the snow hit, so day trips are a little easier than tenting or towing the trailer in possibly bad weather.

Evelyn made the U18 Fire AA hockey team and is super happy that hockey is on. Spectating is interesting as right now we're allowed one parent per player for the games and practices. We do have another family to carpool with this year, they live about 10 minutes away. It's weird that about half the team are old enough to drive themselves this season! Travel is permitted, but the team has no travel planned til December. So we are not sure yet if this means they will travel by bus or if parents will be driving players to the out of town games.

Owen's air cadets is still trying to figure out how to possibly restart safely during covid. 

Both kids are in virtual school. I have struggled with keeping them on task some days as Evelyn's schedule is all over the place. Some of her teachers still teach physically in school, so they change up their online teaching times every week. Owen only has classes Monday thru Thursday, so having long weekends has been nice for him.
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