By CHELSAE CORDIA
Staff Writer
Devin Kirby admits he is lucky to be on this side of the dirt.
In the past four years, the 39-year-old, Doniphan, Mo. resident received a stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma diagnosis, underwent a bone marrow transplant, followed by spleen removal surgery a little more than six months later when doctors feared his cancer had returned.
Adding months of chemotherapy, and multiple treks to Houston and back, it is easy to understand why Kirby is thankful to be alive.
"I had to concentrate on everything that's good," he said. "If I concentrated on the negative, it would have destroyed me. Cancer was an awful, awful experience, but it changed my life in many ways."
Kirby, an attorney, said when his symptoms began, they felt like, "a hangover that wouldn't go away.
"I started feeling like that for about a year, just off and on," he said. "I'd go to the doctors in Cape (Girardeau) and Poplar Bluff and they'd tell me I was depressed. That it was stress induced."
In 2014, Kirby's appetite disappeared and he began to lose "a lot of weight," shedding off about 40 pounds in three months, he said. But once again, doctors chalked his symptoms up to a stressful lifestyle.
"After a doctor tells you that, you don't want to go back because you think you're just being a wimp. But then I started running a fever. I'd run a fever for a week straight," he said.
Finally, Kirby decided to call a friend who practiced medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Florida. He described his symptoms and she suggested he see a specialist right away.
"She said, 'I don't want to scare you or anything, but you have almost every red flag of a malignant cancer," Kirby said.
Soon after their conversation, he traveled to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., where doctors first tested him for various types of infectious disease. At 36, cancer seemed an unlikely culprit, they told him. But after he was cleared of all possibilities, Kirby's doctor decided to run a Positron Emission Tomography (PET) scan, which identifies cancerous areas in the body.
"He said, 'I don't really know how to tell you this, but you have cancer,'" said Kirby, who then asked if it was bad.
Prior to showing him the scan's results, the doctor explained what the various colors on the screen indicate.
"'We don't want to see red,' he told me, and then he just turned the monitor around and it was red all over me. It was just red everywhere," said Kirby, who later learned approximately 90 percent of his bone marrow was infected with cancer.
Not only was it bad, but, Kirby said, the doctor described it as "the most cancer he had ever seen in a patient."
After tests to determine the type of cancer Kirby was dealing with, be it leukemia, Hodgkin or non-Hodgkin lymphoma, he went home for the weekend. When he returned on Monday to meet with his oncologist, it was the doctor who received a surprise after delivering the news that Kirby had Hodgkin lymphoma, the only type of cancer that can be cured.
"You could just tell he probably hadn't given bad news to very many people yet," Kirby said. "He sits down, and my wife is there with me, and he says, 'Mr. Kirby, you have Hodgkin lymphoma.' And my wife and I are like, 'Yeah! Yeah!' and we actually high-fived each other. He didn't know the other doctor had told me one of three is the only one you have a chance on, so that's the one we'd prayed for all weekend, just to give me a fighting chance.
"We were all pumped up."
Upon the recommendation of the Mayo Clinic, Kirby received chemotherapy treatment at Siteman Cancer Center in St. Louis.
"From there, when you have Hodgkin lymphoma, even if you have stage 4, it's very curable because it's typically very receptive to chemotherapy," said Kirby, who added that cure rates were around 80 percent using the method of treatment he received. "They got me in right away and I started treatment within the month. I was at the point where I was so sick, the cancer had spread so much, that I had to do something or it was going to kill me."
Chemo lasted from September until December 2014. While the treatment worked on the majority of Kirby's cancer, it didn't kill it all. In fact, things had taken a turn for the worse.
"I had four new nodes pop up while I was undergoing treatment," Kirby said. "When that happens, it's a lot harder to beat. The cure rate goes way, way down. Now you're in the minority."
Kirby soon learned his only option was to go through a bone marrow, or stem cell transplant. Doctors at Siteman recommended he either go back to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, or to MD Anderson in Houston for the transplant.
He said he chose MD Anderson solely because of the warm Texas climate.
"I chose not to go back to Mayo because it's cold in Minnesota and cold weather just killed me," he said. "The only way I could get relief from the bone pain was to be really, really hot. I'd take multiple hot baths every day."
Kirby said the pain felt "just like waking up the next day after a bad car wreck.
"You hurt all over and the only way I could get away from that was through heat," he added.
Barely a week after learning he would need a bone marrow transplant to essentially reset his immune system, Kirby moved to an apartment inside the MD Anderson medical complex in January 2015.
He sold his wife's Jeep and purchased a minivan for the trip because he was unable to sit up. He said he has since replaced her Jeep, but it was a necessity at the time.
His wife, Angel, and their daughters, Gracen and Makenna, stayed at home, while his parents helped him make the journey. Kirby said he wanted everything to remain "as normal as possible" for his girls.
On April 21, he had the bone marrow transplant, which he said was "rough." He later returned home in May.
Despite the severity of each obstacle, Kirby said the few days following his initial diagnosis at the Mayo Clinic were the worst.
"Out of the entire cancer experience, those few days were some of the most difficult," he said. "Just the unknown. I didn't know if I had a couple weeks to live or... those first few days, that was hard."
The stem cell transplant worked and he was cancer free, Kirby said. In the fall of 2015, he tried to return to work at the law firm he shares with his brother, but became very ill soon after. He visited a local doctor and blood tests indicated a problem. In October, he traveled back to MD Anderson.
"They do a PET scan and my spleen lights up," he said. "(The doctor) calls me in and we sit down and my wife's with me. At that point, he tells me, they believe I have cancer again and were pretty sure it's Hodgkin lymphoma. He showed (the results) to me. It was lit up and there were three spots on my liver that lit up. He told me to make sure my affairs were in order. It was that type of conversation."
Due to the location of the nodes, a biopsy was impossible, he said, which meant the only option was to remove Kirby's spleen a week before deer season, and Kirby, a true Ripley County native, was not going to let that happen.
"We scheduled the surgery for the week after deer season, just before Thanksgiving," he said. "Of course I went hunting. If that was going to be it, I wasn't missing my last deer season. So I went hunting even though my spleen might have exploded (from the kick of the rifle)."
Roughly a month following a successful spleen removal, which the surgeon said was, "full of cancer," Kirby received a phone call while Christmas shopping in Poplar Bluff.
"(My doctor) said, 'I feel like Santa Clause.' He asked if I believe there's a God. I said, 'Yes I do.' He said, 'This is going to come down to one of those miracles because we sent off your spleen and there was no cancer in your spleen. He said we saw it, you saw it, the surgeon saw it, but there was no cancer. It will go down as a medical mystery.' And ever since then, I've been just fine," he said.
Kirby describes himself as fortunate, but doesn't mince words regarding the difficulty of his experience. He said surrendering himself to the medicine and expertise of doctors had lasting effects on his perspective.
"When you're going through chemo, there's nothing you can do to beat this thing or not. You're at the mercy of this medicine. Then you go to the doctor and they tell you if it's working or not. And if it is, you're one of the lucky ones. I had to change the way I looked at life in order to handle it mentally."
Kirby said today, he tries to focus on the positive aspects in his life. He said he now puts his wife and children first, when in the past, he would make his career his priority. He also said his faith in God has grown exponentially.
"My relationship with Christ is far deeper and better," he said. "And now I try to accomplish something everyday. I don't take any days for granted."
Kirby still travels to MD Anderson for annual scans, and so far they have all been clear. His next visit is in April. However, he said the potential is always there for, one day, the scan to come back positive.
"So now, I try to live my life to the fullest," he said. "And I'm a much happier person than I was."