My Cancer Experience

Well I don’t really even know where to begin with this blog. So much has happened in the last few months. Things that I never even dreamed would ever happen to me, certainly not at aged only 40, but it just goes to show – you never know what is round the corner & you can never tell what life might throw at you at any point. I guess you just have to take each day as it comes & deal with things as & when they happen.

2013 started well. I turned 40 at the end of 2012 & wasn’t feeling too bad about it!! I had a little birthday celebration & decided that the best way to deal with hitting my forties was to try to run a little further & bike a little harder!! So I was running & biking a few times a week & getting on with life as a forty year old!! I was due a smear early in the new year & I was very keen to get it done as I had been to the doctor in the autumn with a slightly bit of bleeding in between periods (barely anything) He had examined me & reassured me that it was due to an abrasion on my cervix. I was keen for my smear just for further reassurance that all was okay. When my smear came back as abnormal, I still wasn’t unduly worried as I had abnormal cells cut out in the past (13 years ago). It wasn’t until I went to my appointment where they took some biopsies that I began to suspect that all was not well. When I got the phone call late on Friday afternoon for me to go to the hospital to get my results at 8.50am on the following Monday morning I knew I was in trouble (you don’t get that sort of call to be told all is well). And so began my first weekend of worrying, sleepless nights & hours spent watching the night time tick by on the clock.

As I suspected, I was told on the Monday morning that I had indeed got cervical cancer. I can’t really describe the feeling when you get told something like that. By that point I was almost expected it, but there was still a lot of disbelief – I wanted to ask them to check again, surely there was some mistake?? I had never missed a smear in my life – how on earth could I have possibly got to this point?? They explained that my cervical cancer was the more unusual kind that develops high up in the cervix rather than on the surface making it more likely to get missed on smears – but that just made me feel how unfair it was that mine had been missed. After the disbelief stage came the ‘why me?’ stage, what had I done wrong to deserve this to happen to me? Had I missed something? Could I have done more? Then came the absolute terror & fear – not about being ill or the treatment, but the thought of not being around to see the girls grow up, not being there for them & not being there for Rob too, it really couldn’t be happening – Rob & I have so many more miles to bike together & the girls & I have so much more to do together!

Next I had to go for lots of investigations & scans to see how bad & how far spread the cancer was. Then the team would decide the care plan. So we went through a number of agonising weeks waiting to find out exactly what we were facing. To give the NHS their due, things moved pretty quickly (we even had a CT scan on Easter Saturday – which involved a long drive to Leicester from North Yorkshire for us, as we were away, but hey ho, needs must!) The outcome of all the investigations was that the cancer was quite big (about 4cm) and while it hadn’t spread out of the cervix there was some ‘thickening’ on one side, indicating that it was beginning to spread. Fortunately it wasn’t in my lymph nodes, so we took that as a positive. It was too big to remove it with a hysterectomy, so it was decided that I would have 5 weeks of chemotherapy alongside 6 weeks of external radiotherapy followed by 2 days of intensive, internal radiotherapy (brachytherapy) and so we began the treatment journey.