Close To Death, UNL Student Thankful For Miraculous Recovery, Treatment at The Nebraska Medical Center

Christen Nino De Guzman knew she was sick. The 21-year-old student at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln was sleeping all day and missing class because she felt so tired. She assumed she had the flu.

“I went to a hospital in Lincoln and they told me I was anemic,” said Nino De Guzman. “But in the next few weeks, I developed horrible night sweats – my sheets and clothes would just be soaked.”

She soon ended up in an emergency room and was given antibiotics for bronchitis. Unfortunately, she continued to get sicker.

“I finished school for the summer and was back home in Omaha,” she said. “My mom took me to a hospital here and they discovered I had tumors throughout my abdomen. But after two weeks of testing, they still didn’t have a definitive diagnosis. Meanwhile, my stomach was blowing up like I was seven months pregnant. Doctors thought it was from all the fluids I was getting, but in reality it was the tumors tripling in size.”

That’s when her mom had Christen transferred to The Nebraska Medical Center. “Immediately, there was a team of doctors around my bed trying to figure out what was wrong,” said Nino De Guzman. “Within a day or two, they told me I had a type of non-Hodgkins lymphoma called Burkitt’s Lymphoma. I remember one of the E.R. doctors telling me they thought it was stage four, but he said ‘I think we can cure this.’ I would cling to those words for the next four months.”

“The kind of lymphoma Christen had accounts for only 1% of adult lymphomas,” said

Philip Bierman, MD, hematologist/oncologist at The Nebraska Medical Center and one of the physicians who treated Christen. “It requires aggressive chemotherapy, but it can be extremely difficult to diagnose and there are other kinds of lymphoma that can be confused with it.”

“Patients like Christen should be treated at a place that has the experience with the chemotherapy that’s required for this lymphoma,” said Dr. Bierman. “In this part of the country, we probably have the most experience with it.”

After several rounds of intense and complex chemotherapy as lymphoma treatment, Christen was recently declared cancer-free. She just returned from a trip to New York City and plans to compete for Miss Nebraska USA next year.

“I feel so thankful to live so close to the number one hospital in the world for treating my kind of lymphoma,” said Nino De Guzman. “It’s a place where people come from all over the world to get treated. This will definitely be a special Thanksgiving for my family and me.”

The Nebraska Medical Center has an international reputation for the offering advanced lymphoma treatment options including blood and marrow transplant. Since its founding 25 years ago, physicians and researchers at The Nebraska Medical Center program have been pioneers in the field and are recognized for a number of ground-breaking advancements in lymphoma treatment.

About Nebraska Medical Center:

With a reputation for excellence, innovation and extraordinary patient care, The Nebraska Medical Center has earned J.D. Power and Associates’ Hospital of Distinction award for inpatient services for six consecutive years. It also received the 2011 Consumer Choice Award, a mark of patient satisfaction as selected by healthcare consumers and has achieved Magnet recognition status for nursing excellence, Thomson Reuters 100 Top Hospitals Performance Improvement Leader recognition, as well as the Award of Progress from the state of Nebraska’s Edgerton Quality Awards Program.  As the teaching hospital for the University of Nebraska Medical Center, this 624 licensed bed academic medical center has an international reputation for providing solid organ and bone marrow transplantation services and is well known nationally and regionally for its oncology, neurology and cardiology programs.  The Nebraska Medical Center can be found online at www.nebraskamed.com