A Brave Cancer Update
- Singer-songwriter Ashley Monroe, 34, says she’s made it through two rounds of chemotherapy. She announced in July that she was battling a rare type of blood cancer.
- Monroe admits in a recent interview with Rolling Stone that the toughest part of her diagnosis has been the acceptance; This specific type of cancer will never go away.
- “Apparently this kind [of cancer] will never go away, but the treatments I'm doing can at least keep it at bay for a while,” she explained.
Monroe announced in July that she was battling a rare type of blood cancer called waldenstrom macroglobulinemia, a type of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, which begins in cells of the lymph system.
Read More"I literally am just at home every day," she told Rolling Stone in her latest interview. "I'm stronger than I thought, and most of us are for sure,” she noted of her experience facing the disease thus far.
Fortunately, some recent lab results have shown that her bloodwork is improving, but she has no plans to tour following the release of her new Covers album on Sept. 8. Having just started chemotherapy treatment, Monroe plans on laying low in the interim.
Related: What You Think You Know about Chemotherapy Side Effects May Be Wrong
“I've gotten through two cycles now of chemo. Each cycle is back to back, once a month. It's hard, I'll be honest,” she admitted. “It doesn't feel good the day of and the week after, but I feel like I've bounced back a little quicker this time than my first time.”
Luckily, Monroewho released her last album in Aprilexpressed that she has received a lot of support. “I definitely feel people praying.”
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For Monroe’s specific type of cancer, there is no way to treat it for good, so sadly, she will be living with it. “Apparently this kind [of cancer] will never go away, but the treatments I'm doing can at least keep it at bay for a while,” she explained.
The goal? For the mom and wife to take care of herself as much as possible.
“What my doctors have stressed to me now, my biggest danger is getting an infection or getting sick, even getting a cold, just because my immune system is so low. That's what I've been told: just don't get sick,” she said.
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Processing Her Diagnosis
Monroe said that her biggest change has been “this overall acceptance and surrender of control,” which she admits she probably needed. “Oddly enough, I'm calmer now than I ever was and I'm more in the moment and I can clearly see what matters and what doesn't. In a way, even though it's the worst thing that could happen, it's already doing some long-term good to who I am as a person.”
She said that the acceptance was, and is, gradual. “I still am working on accepting. There's things that chemo does that I don't want it to do. It didn't make my hair fall out at all, but it can thin it. When I first started having it, no one who looked at me could tell, but I could tell, I just felt like, it's my hair coming out. I started crying, like, ‘No!’ Then it was like, ‘Well, get over it. If your hair falls out, get a wig, or style your hair differently or whatever you have to do until you don't have to do it anymore’."
Learning About Blood Cancer
What is a cancer of the blood? Leukemia, lymphoma and multiple myeloma are cancers that primarily affect the bone marrow, the area in your bones where new blood cells are produced. Because they affect the bone marrow, blood cancers are different from other types of the disease like breast cancer or lung cancer.
Related: Blood Cancer Comes in More than 100 VarietiesHow They Differ & What They Have in Common
Dr. Nina Shah, a hematologist at University of California San Francisco, summarizes blood cancers in a previous interview with SurvivorNet: "One cell got really selfish and decided that it needed to take up all the resources of everybody else, and in doing so, took up space and energy from the rest of the body."
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