Cancer and Clinical Services Patient Stories

A long-awaited Hawaiian vacation in less than a month. Two weeks to retirement.

But on that balmy June day in 2016, Lynn Aspey simply relished the thought of spending a little fun and sun time at the pool, so she grabbed her bathing suit. 

And that’s when she found it: a lump in her breast. 

Proactive as always, Aspey consulted her doctor, who sent her straight to the Stefanie Spielman Comprehensive Breast Center, where she underwent several mammograms and ultrasounds.

A couple of weeks later, Aspey was once again at the pool, celebrating her retirement and counting down the five remaining days to her tropical dream vacation. Then her phone rang. 

Aspey found out she had small lymphocytic lymphoma (SLL), a cancer of the immune system. She was placed under the care of what she calls “an amazing team” led by Jennifer Woyach, MD, a hematology specialist at The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center – Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital and Richard J. Solove Research Institute.

“Cancer is such a big thing to process,” Aspey says, “and I was just in shock. I was very dramatic at first, but Dr. Woyach was very calm. I feel lucky to have such a calm, top-notch doctor and team.”

As part of her care, Dr. Woyach got Aspey involved with a clinical trial for high-risk patients with SLL. At the same time, Aspey began seeing a psychologist to help her through the depression and worry that kept her on the couch for many days, not wanting to go out or talk to anyone.

“I thought, ‘What will happen to me? To my family? To my grandbabies?’ Family is the most important thing, and I spent my entire life building my family. I still wanted to be around to cherish them.”

In the first clinical trial Aspey participated in, the medication she took, ibrutinib, worked initially. The medicine blocks a protein, which may help keep cancer cells from growing. But then cancer returned.

Two years after her original diagnosis, Aspey found out the cancer had progressed to chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL), the most common form of adult leukemia. The cancer cells, once primarily located in her lymph nodes, shifted to be mostly in her blood and bone marrow.

“I was terrified,” she says. “When it progressed, I thought ‘Oh my gosh, I’m not going to go make it for my family.’”

Though incurable, CLL can be treated and go into remission, which is what happened to Aspey during a second clinical trial she participated in at Ohio State. As part of that trial, she took the medication VAY736 and after about a year of treatment, her doctor gave her some promising news.

“Lynn,” she said, “you have no cancer.”

That was in 2021. Aspey continues to be in remission.

She’s now 76 and exercises every day and enjoys cooking and hosting parties. In the spring, she plans to go to her granddaughter’s bat mitzvah ceremony in Los Angeles.

Still at times, she worries.

“I know it’s out there,” she says.

Dr. Woyak has assured her: “She tells me, ‘We have new drugs. We have new clinical trials.’ And I trust her,” Aspey says.

She’s open to joining another clinical trial in the future if she needs cancer treatment.

“I will always jump in,” she says. “What they learn from me helps someone else. Someone did that for me and other people.”

Since defeating cancer, Aspey has been volunteering at Ohio State’s Comprehensive Cancer Center – James Cancer Hospital and Solove Research Institute. She’s working with newly hired staff to share her perspective on what she needed as a patient, and she’s a mentor to a woman with CLL.

“I have been given so much from the nurses and the doctors,” she says of her care team. “If you’re getting so much, you give back.”