After the flurry of my diagnoses, I had the much-anticipated consultation…. Which turned out to be the doctor who gave me my stomach drain and told me I had Ovarian cancer! He told me that his plan was to open up my abdomen from top to bottom and he and another specialist was going to remove everything they could see. let’s remember that at this time I was still quite unwell and very weak, I had lost a lot of weight because I wasn’t eating due to the ascites, but he told me ‘I’m going to throw you at a wall and you’re going to bounce back because you’re so young.’
You can imagine that my anxiety was through the roof at what my future looked like and my doctor told me ‘me and you are going to be seeing each other for a very long time, it isn’t curable but it is treatable, think of it like a chronic illness like diabetes’ now that news might not be the best to some people, but look, this was good news to me, they are going to keep me alive!!! Yes, it means constant treatment, but I’m here with my babies and family and that’s the main thing.
I had to wait 2 weeks for this surgery, i had to go and do some fitness tests because this was going to be major surgery and they had to check that I was going to be able to pull through it. My ascites made this very difficult though. I remember they put me on an exercise bike with a facemask on to check my breathing and my stomach was so swollen and it kept popping out from under my top. They must have been thinking to themselves ‘who eat all the pies!’ I had to keep stopping too because I literally couldn’t breathe. I often found myself explaining myself, like ‘sorry, this is just fluid it’s not normally like this’ why am I like this?
Surgery day!!!! F*ck! This is actually happening now. My stomach was bulging so much, and I wasn’t sure if they were going to drain the fluid first before they started, I actually imagined them opening me up though and they would all just be standing there in a pool of my stomach fluid after it gushed out like tsunami! Because this is how I imagine professional surgeons do their jobs apparently. Anyway, surgery prep had begun, had to get an epidural put into my spine and honestly, compared to what I was actually facing, this was the worst thing ever! I had to keep asking them to stop, and it got to the point that my surgeon came in to hold my hand whilst I was getting it done, what a baby! They then put my cannula in, put some amazing drugs through it that made me instantly just love everyone in the room, then the face mask went on and it was ‘night, night Clare, sleep tight’
I was originally told that the surgery would take about 6-8 hours, but I was woken up just 4 hours later, I had drains hanging out of my stomach, and a cannula in my neck!! I was so drugged, but equally as anxious to know why it didn’t take as long as I was told. They got one of the surgeons assistants to come tell me what had happened during the surgery, ‘they couldn’t take it all out, when they opened you up there was more cancer than was originally seen on the scan, they removed the cancer from your small bowel, they removed your Ommentum, they removed the bottom half of your peritoneum, but they didn’t want to do any more in the top half, they need to do another surgery to get the rest out’ ….. my heart sunk, why me? I had just over 80 staples holding my stomach together, I was numb all over from the epidural and other drugs, I was now looking at over a week’s stay in hospital and after I come out of intensive care they put me on a ward next to a woman who had been shot (honestly couldn’t make this shit up) and was being fed through a tube, she kept smoking her vape in the room and drinking the sterilised water they used to flush her feeding tube, she was so abusive to the staff, let’s say those first few days on the ward was quite a show ….. and I still have fucking cancer!!
Recovery was absolutely grim, im not even going to lie, because I was so unwell before the surgery, everything was just such a slow process, I was still hardly eating, I had been put on ensure milkshakes, which is like a protein shake to help you heal better and to give my body the food it needed to get through it all. I had district nurses coming out to my house every day at first to change my dressings, I had to wait for about 2 weeks until my staples could come out, I still had a stomach drain in to drain off any ascites that might come back. The day comes for the staples to come out and because I’m such a lucky lucky person and I hadn’t already been through enough, the bottom part of my stomach popped open, I had a big gaping hole, and you could see the underneath stitches which was literally holding my insides in place! This hole took over 6 months to heal, that’s how weak my body was, everything just took so long to heal.
This part of the story does end well though because, yeah it was hard and yeah I had some of the worst moments of my life during this time, which included having to ask my husband to do some very embarrassing things for me which I wasn’t able to do myself, but the light at the end of the tunnel in this part is, that I did heal eventually and I did start to eat more proper food, and my ascites had given up and left me alone!!
Flipping Cancer! 