Is lymphoma curable?

Abstract

This is early 1980s, a few years after I took up a consultant surgical pathologist post at the Royal Hampshire County Hospital in Winchester. I get a call from Dr Anthony Galea- Debono who is now a physician and neurologist in private practice in Malta. In the late 1970s, Tony and I used to meet often over lunch because we worked not far from each other in London, him at Queen’s Square and I at The Middlesex in Mortimer Street. The call from Galea-Debono is about a young woman in her early thirties who has been referred to him for management of a diagnosis of tuberculosis following an excision biopsy of an enlarged neck lymph node, and wishes the histology reviewed before he starts anti-tuberculous therapy. The lymph node histology, in fact, shows what I thought was a high grade large cell lymphoma with necrosis, the latter feature having been misinterpreted as tuberculous necrosis. The patient also complained of retrosternal pain on ingesting alcohol. I confirm the lymphoma diagnosis with Professor Dennis Wright, at the time a world figure in lymphoid pathology, and conveniently located in Southampton, just down the road from Winchester.