Spoiler alert: They’re fine.
Kimberly Blair Hoffman likes to recall a lighter, sunnier side of the moment when Joshua Craig Woda reached out to her in October 2021, after seven and a half years.
He messaged her on Facebook, despite already having her phone number.
“This is always a point she finds funny,” said Mr. Woda, 31, then on the verge of a bone-marrow transplant after a relapse of Hodgkin lymphoma, a type of cancer that affects the lymphatic system. He knew she would know exactly what he was going through.
She already had two transplants herself.
Each had first been diagnosed while they were students at Binghamton University. The two had met briefly, and awkwardly, in March 2014 when he was a sophomore and she a senior. His fraternity and her sorority had organized a dodgeball tournament, with them in mind — Dodgekins Lymphoma, a fund-raiser for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society. They were both in remission at the time.
Ms. Hoffman said that they “exchanged stories, symptoms and diagnoses,” via email and text before the event.
She had a stem cell transplant the previous January, and although she took the semester off, she felt well enough most weekends to drive from her parents’ home in Brooklyn to visit her off-campus house. He had just finished eight rounds of chemotherapy while taking classes and living on campus.
“Aside from both being in other relationships,” she said, “we were too young and too naïve going through this. How do you have a normal conversation?”
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