LtCol Chris Passerella: A Lymphoma Survivor's Story

Last week, the Chike Springer Foundation kicked off its Veterans Initiative with the Fight Lymphoma Dinner Party. The event was held at the Capitol View at 400 in Washington D.C., and we were also fortunate to be joined by LtCol Christopher Passerella, a lymphoma survivor of stage IV diffuse large B-cell lymphoma. He was joined by his wife Candace and seven-year-old daughter, Violeta. LtCol Passerella is a profound reminder of the importance and power of advocacy, perseverance, and courage. We are so grateful for LtCol Passerella's unwavering commitment to helping those around him by sharing his story. With an unforgettable narrative of his diagnosis and treatment, he underscored the necessity of advocating for oneself throughout this arduous process. LtCol Passerella discovered he had cancer after experiencing chronic back pain and pushing for further tests. After undergoing treatment, he refused to give up, and with the help of the Walter Reed National Military Medical Center team, he eventually beat cancer. LtCol Passerella also shared his reluctance to do the bell-ringing ceremony at the end of chemotherapy, as it reminded him of those who never got that chance. Ultimately, he decided that it was necessary to provide hope to those in the fight and for the staff who needed to see a win.

"My dose was increased to the highest level allowed medically, and it worked. When I approached the bell-ringing ceremony at the end of chemotherapy. And I'll do my best to hold it together here. I did not want to ring the bell at the end of chemo because there were people who would never leave those chairs and would be getting treatment until the treatment was no longer working for them. But then I was encouraged by the thought that the staff that fights this every day needs those successes to keep going, and I'm so grateful that I did that ceremony with you guys that are actually at that table. Thank you."

LtCol Passerella spoke of how he met Chike Springer at Walter Reed, and Chike's positive character and strong spirit caught his attention. He recalled that he told Chike,

"It's gonna suck. It's a beast. Embrace the beast. 'Buckle your chin strap and fight back. You've got this.'"

When asked to speak at this event, Lt Col Passerella was devastated to learn about Chike's passing. We appreciate LtCol Passerella sharing his story to help us raise awareness and funds to advance lymphoma research and honor Chike Springer's legacy. He embodied the spirit of hope with every word, inspiring us all to fight back against lymphoma and do whatever we can to make a difference in the lives of those affected. He is an inspiring example of how to fight cancer with strength and grace.

Read the Full Transcript

[LtCol Chris Passerella]: Dr. Dunleavy, Lyndsay and family, and friends of Chike Springer, As I start this, I do want to say,

Senator Sullivan, I want to thank you for your fervent support in legislation regarding burn pits abroad in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other places. You are what Semper Fi is all about, and I appreciate that, sir. Dr. Dunleavy, tough act to follow. I want to thank you for your focus on the disease that we’re here to talk about tonight, and everything you’ve done towards it as well.

Lyndsay, thank you for the opportunity and encouragement. I am not a public speaker if you can't tell that already. It's not what I would like to do here but thank you for everything you’re doing.

I am LtCol Chris Passerella, and I am a survivor of stage IV diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, and I'm lucky on a number of levels. I’m joined by my wife, assigned to Walter Reed, and my seven-year-old daughter, who is up way past her bedtime. But happy to be here. Violeta, daddy’s going to tell you a story. It's a scary story for daddy. Do you see everybody here, these nurses, these doctors to these people? I'm able to answer any question you have about this story because of the support they’ve given this program and others. I'm also no expert. So when Lyndsay and Elena Nazario, a social worker, and he at mock clinic asked me to speak, I thought maybe they're looking for someone with like expertise in film, like mid 1990s film or a proclivity for dark humor.

But life has symmetry, I was actually on my way back from the Arctic Intelligence Conference, which included references to people from the great state of Alaska representing. I asked Elena for the background information and quickly realized that I had known and met Chike later in my treatment and had a chance to speak with him on a couple of occasions.

I spoke to Lyndsay. I took some time on the plane...there’s a couple of things about Marines, and, sir, you can correct me if you'd like, but we don't necessarily enjoy the spotlight. We don't like feeling sorry for ourselves. We don't like to speak in front of senior officials or officers. So I'm going to do my best, Lyndsay. But I really want to thank you for putting both a Colonel and Senator in front of me today. No pressure, Semper Fi, sir.

So I'm going to try to keep this light like I’m talking to friends. We’ll go over some of my contributing medical conditions, the difficulty of my diagnosis, the process, treatment, and I'll try to approach this with humility and gratitude. This is a good news story for me, but hopefully I’ll keep back the sarcasm and bad jokes here.

So my story, contributing medical conditions. I was first back from two tours of duty in Iraq and checking out of Camp Lejeune to head up to Fort Meade, and I got a call from the medical officer for the battalion, and he said, “Hey, your blood work looks funny, come by and check this out.” For Colonel Sullivan, I am well beyond the statute of limitations on disobeying direct orders. I looked it up in the UCMJ, so I ignored that because I had my letters, and I drove north. I started dating my now wife, Candace. I checked into Fort Meade, I was on top of the world, and weeks later, I was walking into Walter Reed on George Avenue, diagnosed with acute autoimmune hemolytic anemia and idiopathic thrombocytopenia. So Dr. Dunleavy, you should be up here pronouncing these words, not me, but, you know, I had an issue with hemoglobin in my red blood cells, and also have a low platelet disorder. In that time in treatment, lots of prednisone, lots of treatment. I take a third combat tour in East Africa, great stories to tell there. And then, finally, in 2012, I had an open splenectomy. I made it to Afghanistan weeks later; laparoscopic surgery isn’t easy. And Candace was just thrilled that weeks after surgery, I was in eastern Afghanistan. So being a little bit a little more reckless than I wish I would have been. The next phase picks up in earnest in late 2016. And this led to my diagnosis.

I was a major assigned to the Pentagon. Candace, by this time, was a first-year medical student, cheating off of my or my medical treatments for her exams. Violeta was one year old, and I was exhausted on my combat fitness test. I pushed through I got the first class, but I just I started experiencing increasing back pain while running. When I was running, I thought about a movie; I told you, its movie quotes is what you get from me. It was a movie called 50/50. Has anybody seen that movie? All right, great movie. It is. If you want to know how I feel about my cancer experience, it's like 50/50. But Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s character is out for a jog, and he’s in obvious back pain, turns out he has a really obscure cancer with a lot of syllables. And I thought about this as I was experiencing this pain.

Dr. Dunleavy, you can correct me; the median age for lymphoma, and there’s various types, was about 70 years, give or take. Depending what journal you read. I’m some 33-year-old, new father, new major, that’s not presenting like I have cancer. As I went to these clinics, they said, “hey, kid, you’re a marine. Back pain’s normal for a Devil Dog. Here's a shot of Flexeril," but the pain was absolutely tremendous. My platelets went low there. I thought, All over, here we go again. I don't think I can remove my spleen again. So let's see what we're going to do. So I started dexamethasone, went there. I was told to go back to the ER if the pain came back, and it did, and so I did. So finally I convinced my primary care manager, and the lesson here is to be an advocate for yourself at all times, to run some tests at Fort Belvoir Community Hospital on the weekend when the machines were open. They did that and the internal medicine doctor looked at me and said, “You have funny looking blood cells.” [To Dr. Dunleavy] I’m not sure if you've had that conversation with anybody out there, but I was reassured when Walter Reed told me they were 99% sure that I did not have cancer.

At this point, the pain was up to an 11. In my bones, in my body. I say this to say that advocacy for yourself is really really critical as we learn more about these diseases. And as these diseases change. So my diagnosis - the doctors were still convinced that this was not cancer. I was terrified. I asked Dr. Little, who was a resident in oncology, I asked Dr. Wanko, who was the chief, my friends here, the nurses who I don't recognize without their spacesuits. Can we give them a round of applause? We were still convinced this wasn't cancer. I went in for a bone marrow biopsy, the second in my life. And this time, the doctors couldn’t draw up fluid. And I remember my wife finishing her first year of medical school, asking Dr. Wanko, is there a reason you can't draw fluid? And he quietly said yes and exited the room. It was really rude, sir. [Laughter] They finally got a sample, they were discharging me and the pathologist called and says, “this, this guy, this guy needs to stay, needs to stay here.” So the next morning, day of diagnosis, it felt like somewhere, you guys, he correct me if I'm wrong from Walter Reed, between 30 and 50 people entered my room. Doctors, nurses, pharmacists, everybody, social workers. And that's where, that's where time stops. And my hearing went away, It's like I could not hear what was going on. I have respect for these medical teams, Dr. Wanko, Dr. Ben Little, Elena, amazing Elena, I'm so happy to see you tonight. And, and one nurse who seemed scared and couldn't make eye contact got out of the light. So I knew this wasn't going to be good news. They said there’s a certain possibility that you have leukemia or lymphoma. I've already picked you up and put you on our shoulders, and we’re going to carry you back to safety, just like we would in combat.

But it felt like a death sentence. What we know about cancer when we're not in this community. This is a terrifying disease. And apparently, the words out of my mouth were, “my daughter, my daughter,” ‘cause I thought about her growing up without her father. I laid there for a day thinking, all right, there’s some positives here. If I'm going to die soon, I can be a really good person until the end, I can just hold off on all the all the mean things, all the anger. Now, I have a really bad sense of humor, if you can't tell, so the next morning, Marines, we are we are a special group of people. And we were treated really well at Walter Reed; the Marine staff there would put Marine Corp flags and placards with names and ranks. And every morning, I would hobble out there in pain and cross out my name, and I would write Deadpool after the character, the Marvel character, who gets cured of his cancer by getting superhero treatment. And I would ask every day when my superpowers were coming, and that was the way that I had to attack this disease, was with humor and irreverence, something common for usually junior Marines. I'll have to mature out of this at some points.

Let's get to the uplifting. Walter Reed is an amazing, life-saving, world-class facility; I love them. I received one round of R-CHOP therapy shortly before I was asked to make the decision on additional children. Thank God we were surprised with our beautiful daughter when we were, so I proceeded with treatment. And medical advancements were amazing, and they did genetic sequencing and found the MYC rearrangement, which is a genetic mutation that warranted some additional treatment. I moved on to something called dose-adjusted EPOCH-R. A little bit of military history; the C is for cyclophosphamide, I believe, and that came from mustard gas in World War I. So I want to meet the volunteer who was like, “I, I feel sick, hit me with some mustard gas,” But that's really, you know, what's really the pain and forge that that fuel the treatments we have today that helps people survive the disease. And I also received intrathecal chemo into my spine and brain as a precaution. And to take out the remaining brain cells they took away when I advanced in the Marine Corps. I would receive a day of inpatient chemo on the first and last day of each cycle, and in between, I had a portable pump that I would take home and refill every morning in the hospital. Again, continuing with my attempts at humor, and I hear a couple of laughs, so I’m doing okay. I called myself the “mobile Chernobyl” on the metro we went to on the way to the hospital.

And I remember I used this to my advantage too. I remember I took Candace’s car in for repair. I would go on long walks in Alexandria, and it had some benefits. There was a real grease monkey repair shop, and they were definitely working me the best they could until this mechanic says, ”hey, what's in your fanny pack?” And I said, “life-saving chemotherapy drugs. I have stage IV lymphoma.” And, no grease, monkey. I think I got a real, fair deal at the end.

Yeah, I lost my hair. I was exhausted. Young Violeta would want to take walks, and I just wouldn't be able to get up off the couch. But the doctors and staff are helping me anyway. I met some great people. We find some references to what appears to be an increase in young people fighting this disease. I was in a chemo chair next to a fellow Marine, 30-year-old Michael Frill. His father had the same MOS as me when he was in the Marine Corps, and my uncle taught Mike in Egypt when he was stationed abroad with the State Department. Why am I saying this? The community we need to beat this disease and make these advancements is that close knit, and is that far...that closely attached to one another.

I received great advice from Scott, a retired Navy cryptologist. It turns out Lyndsay and I both work at an office building in Fort Meade, Maryland, which is which is also a recent coincidence. He was on his fourth bout with cancer. He told me, “Embrace the beast. The beast has a hold of you; grab him back and fight him.” It fit with my irreverence. I had the privilege to receive chemo next to an Army veteran who loaded and shipped Agent Orange heading to Vietnam. My dose was increased to the highest level allowed medically, and it worked. When I approached the bell-ringing ceremony at the end of chemotherapy, and I'll do my best to hold it together here, I did not want to ring the bell at the end of chemo because there were people who would never leave those chairs and would be getting treatment until the treatment was no longer working for them. But then I was encouraged by the thought that the staff that fights this every day needs those successes to keep going, and I’m so grateful that I did that ceremony with you guys that are actually at that table. Thank you.

I’m almost done. [Speaking to Violeta] You're going to be a zombie tomorrow, but we're going to do this.

Life after has been a mix. Throughout 2018 and 2019, and even now, there's uncertainty. Repeated PET scans for me showed results consistent with disease recurrence. And that shadow just felt like it was following me everywhere I went as I tried to persist with my career. I had repeated PET scans. I had some great workups from the National Institute of Health that were inconclusive, but I'm currently being evaluated medically to see if I can continue my career today and retire proudly as LtCol. It's in this period that I met Chike and spoke to Chike, and I thought, “What a bright, young officer.” You would never know he was a prior enlisted soldier looking at him with his youthful appearance. And apparently, that youthful appearance had some other uses as well, according to Senator Sullivan. I tried to give him an informed message of hope. It's too easy just to be negative, but Marines and Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen, Guardians, Coast Guard, we sometimes we revel in painful conditions. And I said, “Look man, this is going to suck. It's a beast. Embrace the beast.” I said, “Buckle your chin strap and fight back. You've got this.” So I was devastated to hear the news on my way back from the Arctic Intelligence Conference of his passing.

That's my story. That's the contributing medical condition. That's the amazing treatment and the criticality and research of this foundation. And people like Dr. Dunleavy. There are many others who could tell a better story. People I served with I mentioned Michael Frill, also Josh Wiltal, Kyle Kahn, Brandon Campbell, Michael Carnejio. The amazing Sailors I served with that fought this lymphoma and are doing well thanks to the work in this room. Lyndsay, you're amazing. I want to thank you for this opportunity and thank you for all you're doing here for us. And I'm so grateful to be on Team Springer. Thank you all

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Senator Dan Sullivan shares stories about Chike’s character and his commitment to helping others

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CEO Lyndsay Springer: A Dedicated Advocate for Lymphoma Research and Diversity in Cancer Research