A year ago today my life changed forever…

Wednesday 7^th April 2010 started just like any other day for me. I went to work in the job I’d been in for two months and came home ready for my usual evening of socialising. I went for dinner with one of my best friends and her mum then headed off to another friend’s house to watch Rocky Horror as we’d just bought tickets for the stage show in the summer and I’d never seen it. However, that evening, somewhere between dinner and a movie, the person I was at that time somehow just ceased to be. She is just a memory now.

I started to feel really uncomfortable and had a pretty bad tummy ache. I assumed I’d eaten too much and thought very little of it. As the evening went on it seemed to be getting worse, so as soon as the DVD finished I headed straight home. By the time I got home I could barely stand the pain. I struggled to park my car and struggled even more to get out of it and up the stairs. I managed to stand long enough to clean my teeth then just chucked my clothes in a heap and collapsed into my bed in absolute agony.

I barely slept all night, literally writhing in pain. By the time morning came I couldn’t even get out of my bed. My friend came round on the way from her mum’s house to head back home to Wales and as she let herself in and came upstairs I had to warn her that I wasn’t decent in any way because I couldn’t even move to make sure I was covered up. She came in and saw my clothes by my bed where I had fallen out of them and suggested that maybe I should take the day off work if I felt as bad as I was saying. So I did. I called work and said I was very sorry but I couldn’t even move. Even as I was telling them I felt stupid, so I said I was feeling sick. It seemed more real than being pretty well paralysed with pain. I then text my mum, as you do in these situations. We spoke on the phone and she told me to rest up with a hot water bottle. I couldn’t make it to get a hot water bottle. The next thing I knew she was calling me back saying her colleague thought it sounded serious so she was going to get me an emergency doctor’s appointment and come and pick me up. The poor doctor was rushed off his feet with some questionable characters pestering him for sick notes so when he couldn’t work out what was wrong with me he asked me to come back later. My mum dropped me home and went back to work and my dad came by on his lunch break to take me back down to the doctor. He never made it back into work that afternoon though as I was sent to the hospital.

As anyone who has experienced the joy of hospitals knows, A&E is a bloody nightmare. It’s a lot of sitting around and feeling ignored. I could barely even talk and was already bored of explaining my symptoms by the time what seemed like the millionth different person had seen me. It was eventually decided I was probably fine. Maybe I had suffered a small ovarian cyst bursting, maybe not. I was given two types of antibiotics, told to see my GP if it wasn’t any better in 2-3 days and sent on my way, being told to take pain killers as I needed. I needed. A lot. I quickly developed an allergic reaction to the antibiotics too, so that added to the delights of the situation.

I couldn’t face work again the next day and I spent the whole of Saturday unable to do anything. I didn’t even make it to my part time job on the Sunday. By the Monday though I decided that I should just man up and go to work with plenty of pain killers. I only had to work until Thursday lunch time anyway because I was driving down to Brighton for my university housemate’s birthday party. I can remember hovering the office and feeling awful but just smiling at my colleagues and telling them “I’m fine” because a lie is always easier. But on as the week progressed I still just felt awful so after more calls to my poor parents I decided to leave work early one afternoon and see my GP. What happened next I still can hardly believe.

I have never taken to my GP. But on this occasion I explained everything, including how I had been told to come back and had even left it longer than I was recommended just to make sure. He asked me to get on the bed and he didn’t move my belt, trousers or any of the three layers of tops I was wearing and just lightly touched my tummy. Not even where I had told him the pain was and I could feel that he had touched my belt anyway. He then told me that there was nothing wrong with me at all and that he didn’t want to see me about it anymore because he had other patients that he needed to see.

I left that office feeling like utter crap. I never moan about pain, I don’t make a fuss about things like that. I was suddenly terrified. I had never felt pain like this, yet here I was being told that there was nothing wrong with me. I began to question my own sanity.

I went back to work the next day and headed off to Brighton as planned. I continued loading up on pain killers like the crazy person I thought I might be and out we went for dinner. As we left the restaurant though I could feel the pain worsening, and by the time we were in the club I could hardly stand again. Luckily someone was able to give me a lift back to my friend’s house without her having her night ruined. I didn’t sleep all night and in the morning headed straight home. I drove that 100 mile journey crying hysterically and with one leg tucked up to me. When I got caught in traffic I became irrational and started texting my mum. She booked another emergency appointment for my eventual arrival home. By the time I got back I was a wreck. I still do not know how I managed that journey, I really don’t. Off I went to see another doctor who again found nothing wrong after a more useful examination, pregnancy test, various conversations. I was prescribed some stronger painkillers and told to call out of hours if anything happened that night or over the weekend.

Needless to say, my Friday night was spent on the phone to NHS Direct and the in the out of hours centre. That is where things picked up.

A very unremarkable old school doctor spoke to me and felt my tummy and immediately said I had an ovarian cyst. He sent me away with stronger pain killers (oh hello Tramadol, my good friend!!) and asked me to come back the next night. He then arranged for me to go into the hospital on Monday morning for an ultrasound. That scan found two cysts immediately so I was kept in and had an MRI arranged for the Wednesday. At this point I didn’t care what was happening. I was just so relieved to be proven not to be a time waster and to feel that I wasn’t crazy. The fact that the MRI was to determine whether or not I might have cancer didn’t even faze me. I truly felt that I was ready to deal with whatever came my way.

I was sent home with yet more drugs and told not to work or do anything until the results of my MRI were in. My parents decided I should go back to their house so that I didn’t have so many stairs and could be supervised a bit. It wasn’t until I went through my bag of drugs that I realised I didn’t have a sick note for work. I spoke to the hospital who apologised and said if I spoke to my GP over the phone he could tick the boxes and sign one for me to have picked up.

I called that GP I so despised and that’s when he point blank told me that I was wasting his time because he had patients that could be really sick and he didn’t need to be taking phone calls or writing sick notes for me. If no one minds, I think the most appropriate word here is “wanker”. I was a 23 year old girl in severe pain waiting to find out whether or not I had ovarian cancer. But yes, I was “wasting his time”.

Eventually it came to pass that it all looked operable and I could have surgery on the 21^st May. I cried because that was so far away. Mym mum bought me a dress to cheer me up. What else do you do in these situations!?

While waiting for my surgery I came across an one page information advert in Marie Claire that listed all the symptoms I had and warned women of the dangers of ovarian cancer. The typical “if you’re worried, see your GP” thing. I felt like posting it to the arse hole of a GP whose time I had been “wasting”.

The week of my surgery eventually arrived. However on the Monday I started feeling even worse than ever before and by the Wednesday I was pretty well buggered! A quick call to my ward sister, who had just been organising my notes for Friday, and I was on my way back to the hospital. On the Thursday morning I was texting my mum in a rare old state, so much so she left work to come and be with me, just as I was told that they had bumped things around and could do my surgery today. I didn’t even feel bad for whoever may have been affected by this, I was ready to kill myself! I can remember lying in bed waiting for my mum crying in a ball and thinking “this isn’t me, this just isn’t who I am”.

The surgery was a success and two massive cysts were removed. One the size of a grapefruit, the other the size of a watermelon. As I came round from the surgery I can’t even tell you how horrific it was. I was crying hysterically and writhing in pain before I had even woken up. The poor little recovery chap didn’t know what to do with me. He wasn’t allowed to release me until my pain was below a certain level on the old 1-10 scale and he’d already given me all the morphine I was allowed. All he could do, bless him, was smear some KY Jelly on my lips because the oxygen mask had made them so sore. At least something funny came out of that! Did not expect him to bring that back from the cabinet when I asked for lip balm. My poor face felt slimy as hell! But I eventually settled down enough to be taken back to the ward.

 My surgeon was pleased and off he trotted on holiday on the Saturday. By the Saturday night however, things took another nasty turn.

I hadn’t been feeling any better. In fact, I had been feeling progressively worse and worse. The nurses told me I should be better than I was, so of course I felt even more rubbish because there I was, someone who prided themselves on not making a fuss, and yet I wasn’t at the stage I should be at in my recovery. I started to think I was a right wimp! I was watching the morphine clicker count down so that I could click it as soon as I was allowed another dose. But then they took that away from me. I couldn’t sit up but they made me. I was forced to get out of bed and sit in the chair. That made me feel horrendous and I quickly begged to be allowed back in bed. But as I caught sight of my face in the mirror I was horrified. I didn’t even recognise myself. I was whiter than the sheets on the bed. I looked like I imagine a corpse to look. Only less healthy.

By that night I couldn’t eat or drink or move my arms and legs. I had even been sick (NOT a nice thing when you have had abdominal surgery, let me tell you! Oh retching on stitches!!) My parents were putting cold flannels on my head and I had the window open and the fan on. Thank heavens I had my own room! I could hear my heart thumping. It was excruciating. It felt like an insanely loud base banging inside my ears. I couldn’t breathe properly. My pulse was well over twice my normal resting rate. Nobody seemed to know why I had deteriorated so much and my parents were allowed to stay well beyond visiting hours and I just kept wishing everyone would leave so I could just die. Honestly, if someone had come in right then and said “here’s a lethal injection. Five minutes and this will all be over and the pain will go away. Do you want it?” I would have said yes with all the strength I had left.

What seemed like a lifetime had passed before someone eventually managed to get a doctor in (oh the joys of thinly stretched staff, poor things) and I had some blood taken. It transpired that I had a HP count of half what it should be. That meant that somehow half of my blood had just gone! No one knew how or why, it has never been discovered in fact.

But then it was suddenly a situation that could be fixed. I could have some blood transfusions!

Unfortunately all my poor veins had somewhat given up the ghost and the whole process was as traumatic as can be (in case you hadn’t noticed, I clearly don’t do things by half! Why not go the whole hog with this being poorly malarkey!?). Through much pain and collapsed veins and eventually a good vein and less pain I had three blood transfusions. It is unbelievable how quickly you start to feel better once blood starts flowing through your veins again.

By the Monday afternoon I could move a bit and even managed a sit down shower with my hands all bagged up to protect the cannulas. I was allowed home with the wheelchair my parents had borrowed for me and much padding around the seatbelt combined with the most careful drive of my dad’s life.

The weeks that followed were tough. I had endless tablets to take and I had an episode of collapsing and all manner of things along with very little sleep. But slowly I started to recover. As each week passed I couldn’t believe where I’d been seven days previously. I even made it to the Rocky Horror tour. But let me tell you, that is not somewhere you ever want to go when you’re stuck in a wheelchair. Men in thongs. Everywhere. At face height. Not a pretty sight, I can tell you!

When I finally got the all clear at my follow up on the 7^th July and found out that the tumours were benign I was ready to have my life back.

I went back to work after three months off. I started slowly doing all the things I loved again. I vowed to do everything in my power to be the best version of me that I could be. I was suddenly all for second chances, living in the moment, learning, loving, sharing, laughing, trying to only do things that make me happy and trying to wake up every day and find a reason to smile. To be honest, it’s pretty bloody easy to find a reason to smile when you thought (and even hoped) that you were going to die just a short while ago.

I wouldn’t have made it through that time without my unbelievable parents and my amazing friends. I realised just who were the most beautiful people in my life through all of this. I now strive to surround myself with only the wonderful people. And let me tell you, I know some real angels. I try to thank them as often as I can. I love my friends and family. I really do. I am pretty good at telling them that too.

So there we go. That’s my story. If you take nothing else from this, then please try to find a reason to smile every day.

And hey, what I would really like you to do is look out for any tiny thing that could be your body telling you something. You know your body, you can tell if something isn’t right. Don’t listen if someone tells you you’re wrong. Get a second or even third or fourth opinion. You deserve a chance to live. I was so lucky I can’t even fathom it. Because had those tumours been malignant, it would probably have been too late. Most people with ovarian cancer don’t realise until it is too late. You can lose your fertility or even your life, so just keep an eye out for any of the symptoms.

I would also like you to all go and give blood. It really will save someone’s life. I used to give blood and I am so glad I did, because I helped people like me. You could too. That could be your best friend / parent / child / sibling / anyone that needs a transfusion to live. So go do it. It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t take long and you get free biscuits. What have you got to lose!?

So people. Live, love and laugh. Live every day to its fullest because you really do never know when it might be your last.

Thank you for reading my story.

http://www.ovarian.org.uk/ovariancancer/whatyoushouldknow.asp

http://www.blood.co.uk/