When Nevin Shoker, 29, began coughing so violently that he started throwing up, he thought something was seriously wrong. But his doctor insisted that it was nothing to worry about.
The attacks escalated quickly—and within weeks, Shoker, who lives in California, found himself also suffering from severe itching and unexplained fatigue.
“My legs were itching to the point where it felt like there was like bugs under my skin. I was just like scratching till I bled,” he told Newsweek. Yet his doctors just dismissed it as eczema.
Fighting for a Diagnosis
As new symptoms piled up—night sweats, exhaustion and a swelling lump in his neck—Shoker contined to push for answers.
“Finally they took me serious when I had like this big golf ball lump on my neck and my armpit,” he said.
At urgent care, a physician finally validated Shoker’s fears.
“He’s the first doctor to like take me serious and reconfirm that I’m not crazy and that something’s actually happening,” he said. But even then, he faced more waiting.
“Then they gave me the run around in the ER too…that’s so many steps,” he said.
Facing Hodgkin Lymphoma
From the first symptoms in June to his official diagnosis in November, five months had passed. By then, Shoker’s disease had advanced such that when he was diagnosed, he was told he had stage four Hodgkin lymphoma.
“Hodgkin lymphoma is a cancer of the immune system that begins in a white‑blood cell called the B‑lymphocyte,” hematologist Dr. Shalin Kothari of the Yale Cancer Center in Connecticut told Newsweek.
Looking back, Shoker’s initial symptoms were textbook. “The classic first warning sign is a painless, slowly enlarging lymph‑node mass-most often in the side of the neck, but also in the underarm or groin,” Kothari explained. “Other symptoms can include unexplained fever, drenching night sweats, or unintended weight loss.”
Even after his eventual diagnosis, there were more delays. “After I got diagnosed it took two months of a process just to get approved by insurance to start chemo,” he said.
Even now, having finished hos first round of chemotherapy, Shoker says the waiting remains stressful—in fact, he even faced a long wait to get the results of his latest scan.
“I read my PET scan online. I was like freaking out this last week…So I was just like in that spiral for a couple of days.”
To ease the uncertainty, he turned to ChatGPT. “I put it into ChatGPT…And then it showed a complete response to the treatment,” he said.
The good news has given Shocker even more reason to be hopeful, and his outlook on the future is positive. “With lymphoma…It has a really high cure rate. So it’s about 90 percent chance you could be cured,” he said.
Sharing His Journey
Since his diagnosis, Shoker has documented his experience on TikTok, where he now has more than 46,000 followers.
For him, posting became a kind of self-made therapy. “I always wanted to go to therapy, but my insurance never covered therapy,” he said.
Looking to the future, Shoker hopes to continue sharing his journey to better health, helping as many people as he can in the process.
“There’s been a lot of people that have DM’d me personally and left a ton of comments…just saying how impactful my journey has been on their journey,” he said.
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