This upcoming weekend is the Pineapple Classic, a 5k adventure obstacle awesome course to benefit lymphoma and leukemia. A muddy, slip-n-slide good time.

Leukemia is a little more widely understood, but personally, I've always been a little hazy when it comes to the details on lymphoma. Lymph nodes are small, roundish organs of the immune system, which you can find all over your body. You've probably had issues with them during ear, nose or throat infections. They house a variety of immune cells, including B and T cells. While your lymph nodes can become large and inflamed for all sorts of reasons, and all sorts of cancer, when they start to create the malignant cells and grow a solid tumor, that is when you have lymphoma. There are over 70 types of lymphomas, so maybe we'll get into that later.

Typical symptoms include fever, fatigue, weight loss, coughing and chest pain, swollen lymph nodes, unusual feelings in your abdomen, and soaking night sweats...hmm kind of sounds like the flu except you don't have the flu. Seems to make sense for a cancer in your immune system! And since you shouldn't go asking your doctor if you have cancer every time you want to take a nap, it's important to be listening to your body so that you can recognize a common cold and something more serious.

Treatment can vary, depending on the degree of the disease. Sometimes you just wait and see what happens, other times you can get radiation or chemotherapy, all the way up to a stem cell transplant if recurrences occur (hey! this is a good time to get on the bone marrow registry!).

Now back to pineapples and mudpits!