I was booked into A&E. A few tests were done by the nurses whilst I was laying on the bed waiting to see a doctor. The nurse used a small piece of tissue paper to tickle different parts of my legs and asked if I could feel it, which I could. The nurse then asked me to raise my legs and apply pressure to his hand to test the strength in my legs, but there was not much there. When asked to wiggle my toes, I tried to wiggle them all, but they didn’t move at all. The doctor concluded that further investigation had to be made and I was popped into a room to wait. A short while later a doctor took a blood sample which was promptly sent off for analysis. After a couple of hours, the results were back and it was not good news. The results showed that my white blood cell count was a lot higher than it should be. I was told that I had an issue with my blood and they needed to send it off to a different hospital to be scrutinised and that I would be staying the night. The doctors said that if the result of the blood test was bad news, I would be going to a specialist unit for treatment and if the results revealed something that was easily treatable I would be on my way home soon.
The following morning came and I woke up to four or five doctors standing around my bed and they broke the news, it was leukaemia and I was going to be in the hospital for a few months. I was told that to fix the problem I would need a bone marrow transplant and that the procedure was lengthy and came with risks. My mother who was sat next to me at the time started to cry and grabbed my hand and held it tight. I looked at her and told her not to worry and that I wasn’t going anywhere. This news for me didn’t really sink in at first as aside from the electric shocks and the trouble walking, I didn’t feel like I had cancer. When you have cancer you are meant to feel really tired, aren’t you? I didn’t feel fatigued at all, I was just having some issues getting around. To say that I wasn’t a little taken aback by the news would be a lie, but it didn’t feel like the right diagnosis to me. A million questions go through your head at this point. Questions like; What has caused it? Am I going to die? Is this it for me? Risks with the procedure? What risks? After the initial shock of being told such news, you do settle down and some rational thoughts do return. I didn’t know anything about leukaemia, or bone marrow transplants, never really had to know. All I could think about were the adverts on the TV that show a bald child with a sad face. My lack of knowledge and experience around the subject of blood cancers wouldn’t last much longer. I was about to find out all about it.
The following day I was taken to a different hospital and wheeled through on my trolley to a specialist cancer unit where I was greeted by the nurses who explained to me what was going to happen. I was booked in for a CT scan and an MRI scan that very same day. The scans were done that evening and they revealed the issue that I had been suffering with for so many weeks, a tumour, about 10 inches long around the top my spine. The tumour had grown around it and was pushing against my spinal cord. This pressure was enough to prevent the signals sent by my brain reaching my legs which is why they didn’t move when I wanted them to. This went some way to explaining that big flash and collapse I had experienced too.
The doctors told me that they had to move fast with the treatment, the cancer was aggressive and if they wanted to prevent me from being wheelchair bound for the rest of my life or even worse to succumb to the illness they had to get on with things. I was taken down to theatre where they installed a Groshong line into my chest so the chemotherapy drugs could be administered. The amount of liquid chemotherapy I needed would have been too much for the veins in my body to cope with so they installed a ‘line’ into the top of my heart so the chemotherapy solution could be fed in directly and pumped around the body.
