Kentish Gazette Canterbury & District
‘I was willing to do anything to help’
Two years ago mother-of-three Sharon Thurston was diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma after complaining of extreme tiredness, weight loss and skin lesions.
She volunteered to become one of just 1,240 patients worldwide to take part in an international clinical trial to investigate the use of an antibody in patients with the disease.
She was also one of just 14 entered by the East Kent Hospitals Trust for the treatment.
Sharon, who was 49 at the time and working as a guide communicator for the Kent Association for the Blind, said: “I started to go to Kent and Canterbury once a fortnight for intravenous chemotherapy treatment. I also had blood tests taken twice a month and regular PET and CT scans.”
Sharon had to have her drugs administered at the Cathedral Day Unit at Kent and Canterbury Hospital, with treatment sessions lasting several hours.
Her lymphoma started to rapidly respond to her treatment, but she still had to complete six cycles to eradicate all traces of the disease.
She slowly began to recover and regain her strength, and the cancer was gone.
Now she is in remission and only has to attend the hospital once every three months for follow-up tests. In 2008, and aged 67, Heather Knivett was diagnosed with chronic lymphocytic leukaemia.
The slow, progressing cancer, which generally cannot be cured, had caused a number of alarming symptoms, including swelling in her neck.
As Heather and her husband Ted came to terms with the diagnosis, she was offered a place on a clinical trial.
Its aim was to put the cancer into the deepest remission possible through an antibodycontaining treatment which was not generally available to NHS patients at the time.
As a result of the trial’s findings, the drug, Rituximab, is now widely available to older patients with chronic leukaemia and has the effect of significantly improving remission rates.
In June 2014, Heather also volunteered to take an anti-cancer drug called Ibrutinib, again as part of a clinical trial called Resonate.
She said: “I was willing to do anything to help and I knew I’d be helping the hospital and other patients, too. I was kept fully informed throughout and now think of the staff as friends.”
Heather still takes Ibrutinib but only has to visit the Kent and Canterbury Hospital four times a year to be reviewed by her consultant and research team.