Pamela and Darren Pousson join their daughter Maylee, 4, in playing in the South Park leaves. Darren’s diagnosis came when Maylee, his oldest daughter, was just 2 months old.

Darren Pousson plays with his daughter Albany, 2, on a sunny day last fall in South Park near downtown. Pousson was diagnosed in 2005 with both Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphoma, a rare occurrence.

Darren Pousson holds his daughter, Maylee, three months old at the time.

Darren Pousson was diagnosed with both Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphoma in August 2005 and began treatment soon afterward.

Darren Pousson is a man like any other in many respects. He has a lovely wife, Pamela, two children, Maylee, 4, and Albany, 2, another child on the way, and a career as an electrician.

But there’s something about Pousson that truly makes him one in a million.

“I was coughing a lot and had been for several weeks,” he said.

In August 2005, he went to the doctor hoping for treatment that would keep his then-2-month-old daughter from contracting what he thought was pneumonia. However, he discovered that his condition was much more serious than he had previously suspected.

“They took a chest X-ray and the doctor said, ‘I don’t want to scare you but your chest doesn’t show pneumonia. You have all of the signs and age and everything of lymphoma.’ I said no, really, what’s going on?” And the doctor then said, “Either your heart just exploded and we took an X-ray of it, or something else is terribly wrong.”

Biopsy samples were taken from a mass near his heart and after many tests by several labs, it was determined that Pousson had gray zone lymphoma. Gray zone lymphoma is an affliction in which a patient has both Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. It’s a disease that afflicts only one in 1 million people.

Treatments followed and they alternated weekly. Pousson received injections of mustargen — a derivative of mustard gas — on one of these three-week cycles by oncology staff in full protective clothing.

“They didn’t want anyone else to touch it but they were injecting it straight into me,” Pousson said.

“As pain management, he was given medications that worked like short-term memory blockers,” Pamela Pousson said. “Darren would have lengthy conversations with friends that had come to visit and have no recollection of the event the next week. At the time, it was frustrating but now we can look back and just laugh.”

Excluding two weeks when his white blood cell count was too low to receive treatment, his chemotherapy went very well.

“It went by so, so quickly,” Pamela Pousson said.

“The bills haven’t,” her husband added, as the couple laughed together.