During the UK’s first national lockdown, I lost my amazing little dad to covid, this happened in the March of 2020. In April 2020, we were all in a state of unknowing and worry, are we going to get covid? will we ever come out of lockdown? I didn’t really get a period of time to grieve for my dad properly due to this, which ultimately was ok with me, because why do I want to let that pain in? Anyway… during April I began to feel a little unwell, and without going into great deal of my actual symptoms, I will simply say, they were very much similar to IBS symptoms, only a little more severe.
My doctor diagnosed me with IBS through a phone consultation, as obviously covid was rife and we weren’t allowed to visit the doctor. I was given Buscopan medication to treat my symptoms, but obviously this never worked. Months passed and many phone calls to the doctor passed only to be told the same thing repeatedly. during these months, my stomach began to slowly swell. Fast forward to August 2020, my stomach then looked like I was ready to birth triplets!! I was so uncomfortable, was unable to eat much, had to sleep sitting up, could barely breath walking from one room to the next… and I thought to myself ‘surely this can’t be IBS’ so I made the decision to take myself to A+E, where after a lengthy wait, a doctor did an ultrasound scan on my stomach and found free fluid which is what they call ‘ascites’. Now obviously as an A+E doctor he was unable to tell me much more, but he did give me his opinion on what can cause this fluid to build up, one of the reasons which he thought was likely, was a tumour.
What?!?!?! a tumour? I remember walking out of A+E and sitting in my car and just crying my eyes out, I was thrown into the biggest black hole ever! I actually cried writing this part of the blog with just remembering how broken I felt at that exact point.
I had to wait for a CT scan, but the fluid was getting too much to cope with and 3 days later I took myself back to A+E, surely they must be able to help me? at this point the fluid was so severe that I was unable to pass urine because it was squashing everything inside my abdomen. At this point the doctors took blood from me an unbeknownst to myself they actually checked a tumour marker called CA125 which is an Ovarian cancer tumour marker, and the number came back at 1002! Now that number may mean nothing to you, but if I tell you that a normal CA125 ranges from 0-35 you can clearly see that that number for me was very high. I was told that they suspect I have a tumour on my ovaries, and that they were sending me for an urgent CT scan to see what was actually going on.
The wait for the results for this CT scan was horrendous to say the least, I was in a bed next to a girl who kept telling the nurses to ‘f*ck off’ and when she eventually quietened down to go to sleep, I had the fortune of looking at her arse for hours on end because she wouldn’t pull her trousers up, and I remember just lying there thinking to myself ‘what the actual hell is going on? how has me having IBS led to this?’ I was so scared.
CT results came back, and although nothing was found on my ovaries, I did have small nodules which they could see, on my Omentum (this is like a fatty cape that extends over the front of the abdomen). it was all kind of whirlwind from this point. I was booked in to get a biopsy, but before this I was sent to the Women’s Hospital to get the fluid from my stomach drained as I was becoming very unwell because of it…….. 6 whole litres of fluid was drained from my stomach, that’s what I had been carrying round for months, no wonder I was so sick!! things got a little better at this point and I was able to eat a bit more food and build my strength back up. unfortunately, the ascites accumulated again very quickly which saw me back in hospital 2 weeks later for another stomach drain… 7 litres this time, in just 2 small weeks! I had my biopsy done a few days after the second drain and had to wait 2 weeks for the results.
Those 2 weeks where the darkest of days for me, I had reached rock bottom mentally. I couldn’t think straight, I was very irrational in my thoughts of what was going to happen to me. I cried a lot! I didn’t tell anybody other than my close family about what was happening, I didn’t want it to be real. the ascites just didn’t let up though and just 2 weeks after my last stomach drain, I was back in hospital getting another…. 9 litres this time!!!! it was during this drain that the doctor who was performing the procedure told me he could see that the biopsy results had come back, and it confirmed I had malignant ovarian cancer…. I was taken to a bed to wait for the drain to complete which took hours, and there were 2 patients sitting opposite me, trying to start friendly conversation, asking me what was wrong with me etc… but I couldn’t even look them let alone talk. I’ve got cancer! shit!!!! what am I going to do now? tears just rolled down my face the whole time I was sat there with a drain hanging out of my stomach…. the most surreal moment of my life! little did I know at that time that the doctor who told me this news, would become my lifelong angel in disguise!
The very worst part about all of this time, was that we were still in a state of lockdown, the hospitals didn’t allow any visitors and I had to make all these appointments and procedures on my own, I had to walk in the dark on my own! and although that was hard, I believe that’s made me stronger to this day!
Flipping Cancer! 