My Bio

Hi, my name is Chenin Iglowitz. I'm 35 years old, a nurse and sargeant in the U.S.Army, working in the labor and delivery ward at Fort Lewis, WA. For about a year I've been fighting non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma. Actually it was last Thanksgiving Day, (2008), when the doctors found a tumor sitting on my heart. It was a huge shock, being young and active, and othewise pretty healthy. My sister and I were regularly working out, cooking lots of good food, and exporing Washington. (We'd just moved in together after I had lived in Hawaii for 4 years and she'd been living abroad.)

We named my tumor the Tingler after an old movie with Vincent Price (1959). It was important to maintain some humor amidst the big scare of “CANCER”… I mean, its scary, but we have so many supportive friends and family around, so we are fighting this battle. And we are now asking for your help.

At first we completed the standard chemotherapy for my type of cancer, which was 6 months of treatment. And initially my tumor began to shrink but then it stopped shrinking. That meant we failed our first regimen of chemotherapy, so then we moved onto to a second regimen, or “salvage chemotherapy” to ‘clean up what’s left’. But the Tingler is a persistent little devil and he was resistant to this chemo regimen also. That brings me to today where I need a donor transplant of bone marrow/stem cells. A donor transplant is my best hope for cure. The problem is that my sister is not a match, and our search in the National Bone Marrow Registry returned negative. I’ve just completed a self-transplant of stem cells to, hopefully, keep the Tingler at bay while we wait to find a match.

Chenin's Parents

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