SALT LAKE CITY (KTVX) — When she first got her cancer diagnosis years ago, 84-year-old Dukhi Hong couldn’t have imagined coming this far. “It feels like a dream,” Dukhi said in Korean, while reminiscing about the past six years she’s spent coming to the cancer center.
The doctor said that with her diagnosis, patients have six to nine months left to live. However, on Friday, Dukhi exceeded all expectations: She came to Utah Cancer Specialists to receive her 100th dose of immunotherapy.
Alarms first started to ring for Dukhi’s health in June of 2019. According to her daughter, Dukhi collapsed in a seizure, so the family rushed her to the emergency room. That’s when the doctors found small-cell lung cancer in her body.
The form of cancer that they found was notorious for being aggressive and for spreading quickly. At the time, the cancer had already metastasized to the brain, explained Dr. Stephan Kendall, the medical oncologist at Utah Cancer Specialists.
“Our whole world crashed,” Dukhi’s daughter, Mitzi Maughan, told Nexstar’s KTVX while tears flooded her eyes. The pain of when she first received the news is still fresh to Mitzi.
Dukhi first came to Utah in 1965 from Seoul, South Korea. She had followed her then-husband to live in a land that was 6,000 miles away from her home. Sixty years later, she still remembers the exact date: “It was May 16th,” she said.
“I didn’t know how to speak English. I had just learned the ABCs,” Dukhi said.
She was pregnant at the time, and about seven years after coming to the country, she became a single mother, raising three daughters and a son on her own. “It was tough… But somehow, I just lived on.”
“She’s our hero,” Mitzi told KTVX. She said her mother’s strength and positivity continue to inspire her.
The family had to squeeze their lives in between doctor appointments, as Dukhi had to come in every three to four weeks to receive her dose of immunotherapy. What started out as a bleak affair has now become a happy family occasion, as the whole family gathers to be with Dukhi during her immunotherapy sessions.
“We make it an outing, and we just know that the treatment that she just received is going to buy us more time with her,” Mitzi said.
Balloons, cakes, daughters, sons-in-law, and laughter filled the treatment room as Dukhi awaited the end of her infusion.
“I’ve never had a patient receive 100 doses of any kind of treatment, honestly,” Dr. Kendall said while explaining Dukhi’s case.
Dukhi’s recovery has reportedly perplexed doctors.
“We certainly don’t understand everything,” Dr. Kendall said, but he added that it might be something within her immune system that helped her to respond so well to the drugs.
Dukhi’s latest scans showed no signs of cancer in the lungs. However, this doesn’t mean she is completely out of the woods. Small cell lung cancer can come back, and when it does, it’s harder to treat, according to Dr. Kendall.
Also, her prognosis showed some of the cancerous cells in her brain coming back, although at a very minimal stage. Overall, “She’s doing really well,” Dr. Kendall said.
On Friday, Dukhi left the center in a cheerful gait as if to flaunt her remarkable triumph over a deadly cancer. Her family tagged along, eager to spend the precious time that their mother and immunotherapy had been able to pave.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by PostX News and is published from a syndicated feed.)
