Scans, Surgeries and Sleep...(WARNING! Graphic photos...)

So, the next couple of weeks went by, until I had my first real taste of hospitals and tests on 17th February. I was scheduled in for a pre-operation check and a CT scan of my pelvis, abdomen and thorax-basically everywhere except for my arms, legs and head.

The time before this is very much of a blur to me-it's almost like a big void in time. I remember going home for the weekend, and Richard and I celebrating a very low-key valentines day with a 'dine in for £10' deal from M&S and my landlords moving me out of my room to rip my ceiling down, but apart from that it's pretty blank!

I arrived on the Thursday morning and was promptly poked, prodded and asked sufficient questions so that I was allowed to go into hospital. I then experienced my first ever CT scan. They are definitely an experience!! First, you have to drink this HORRIFIC substance. It tastes like watery, milky, orangy, chalk. With a bit of mint thrown in for good measure.




After you've sufficiently drank 800ml of this, the take you out and put in a canular so they can pump iodine into you while you're being scanned (this was the best bit, as after she'd put in my canular, she told me to go back to my boyfriend, who was actually my dad. Much hilarity ensued, and it seemed to be the general opinion that Castle Hill took of my dad....bit awkward when Richard was around, who they incidentally thought was my brother...) Then, you are taken through to. Nice big, airy, air conditioned room, and lay down on a little bed. Then you lie there, and are moved back and forward, while this big donut passes over your body several times, and thousands of pictures are taken. When they finally administer the iodine, it really does feel like you've wet yourself-your whole body goes really warm, and it is only because they warned me of this before that I wasn't too embarrassed to get up! (for the record, I hadn't wet myself). Then that was it! After 15 minutes of being pushed around in a tube, and 10 minutes waiting for the canular to be removed, I was set free, until the following Wednesday, when my surgery was scheduled for.

It had been agreed that my Mom would come up to Hull to stay with me post-operation so that she could look after me and do Mom-type things. She arrived over the weekend, ready for a shopping day on the Monday for some suitable post-operative clothes, pyjamas and skin products. On the Tuesday, I had to go back to the hospital to have some radioactive dye injected into the original site of my melanoma. The idea is that the lymph system drains this dye up to the related lymph, so it can be detected which lymph node cleans out that bit of skin. The thought process goes, that that lymph will be the first place the cancer has spread, so to test that node is the logical next step. If it has not spread to that node, it is unlikely it has spread anywhere else, but if it has spread, it is more likely it has and could be in further lymphs. If this is the case, a full auxiliary dissection has to take place...not what I wanted to happen at all. So I had this dye, and they x-rayed it to show that one lymph was linked to that piece of skin, and that was the lymph they would remove the next day. Tuesday night, we all went out for a meal, and prepared ourself for the next day. We were up at 5(!!!) to get ready for the hospital at 7.30. The hardest bit so far?? NIL MY MOUTH!! No tea, no coffee, no squash, not even water! Nothing was allowed in my mouth after midnight, and that was pretty bad. Especially at 7am... (it was even harder at 11.30..!) We all went to the hospital (Richard, Mom and Me), I checked in, and then I waited. Even though my operation was supposed to be early, by the time I was seen it was getting later and later. Richard had a rugby match to play in, so after I'd seen the anaesthetist and my surgeon, they left. I got all dressed up in my 'scrubs' and it was show time.

I was taken into a room and lay on a bed, where they took off my slippers and my glasses, leaving me all-but blind! There they inserted a canular into my hand, attached me to several monitoring devices (blood pressure, heart rate etc) and then pumped me full of something that made me drift off to sleep.

I woke up a few hours later feeling pretty numb, with my first question being 'have I had a skin graft?!' it had been something up in the air, and I was really hoping I hadn't...unfortunately I had. I was allowed to go home a few hours later where I settled down and slept for the majority of the next 48 hours. Groggy was definitely the word!

I had to wait three weeks before I had the results of my operation, which was testing to see if the cancer was in the local area (wider excision) and if it had spread to my lymphs. So they took a coffee-cup size chunk out of my arm, which needed a skin graft to heal (from my left thigh) and they also cut open my arm pit a little bit, to get at the lymph that had been detected with the dye. So needless to say, I was pretty sore. The wait for results was a long one, punctuated by visits from parents, friends, trips out, and lots of healing. The main grief I got was from my leg where the skin graft was, and where they warned would be the worst. After the first couple of days, it was weeping very badly and making a mess everywhere. After several bandage changes it sorted itself out though! My armpit was incredibly sore too, and I struggled to do anything with my left arm. The wider excision itself didn't really hurt at all, which made me think it wouldn't look too bad when I first saw it. Boy was I wrong.

I'd had several dreams about what it would look like, one being like meat and one like a box in my arm, but nothing had prepared me for what it would look like, and still to this day I am shocked by it. I honestly thought it was someone else's arm when the nurse began unwrapping the layers and layers of bandages and I saw a sponge sewed into my arm (as a pressure garment). As she unstitched it and pulled it off, I was dumbstruck at what was underneath...




And that was it...in all it's glory. It looked like prosthetics, and made me feel pretty sick!

That was accompanied by my arm pit...

And my skin graft site...



Lovely.

The next three weeks passed, with various other bandage changes and dressings-it was almost like having visitation rights to my own arm! And then we all waited with baited breath for the results...


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The start...

I am incredibly pale. Fact. It is for this reason that I have never been on a sunbed. I have, of course, suffered from few rogue sunburns (who hasn't?!) and really hate the pain and discomfort of it. I knew if I went on a sunbed that the same thing would happen! I used to joke that I would burn if I even thought about the sun! I also kind knew that sunbed caused cancer, as I think most people do, but I was unaware that there were several types of skin cancer, varying in severity.

So when I found a lump on my left forearm which seemed to appear almost overnight, cancer was one of my last thoughts as to what it might be. In fact, I didn't really have any idea what it might be, so I went long to the doctors thinking that he would have a better idea. The doctor assured me there was nothing wrong with my new mole, but that he could refer me to a dermatologist for a second opinion, if I wanted him to. I thought 'yeah, why not' so went away and waited for my appointment. When it finally came through, it was for 21st December, 10 weeks after I initially went to the doctors. This was really inconvenient, as it was in Hull and home was 150 miles away, where I should have been at this point, having broken up for Christmas after the first semester of my music degree. When I tried to rearrange it, I was told that I would have to reapply for the appointment and I was incredibly close to cancelling it all together. I mean, I had been assured it was all ok, and this was just a precaution, and it seemed like a lot of fuss if there was nothing to be worried about, like the doctor had assured me. But after some wise words from my parents, I decided to go ahead with the appointment.

I waited for my appointment with life ticking on nicely and the mole not causing my any problems and remaining in the back of my head, apart from some hilarious mocking from my housemates, and referring to it as my 'third nipple'. It didn't cause me any hassle at all, until one day I caught it on some books and it bled like I have never seen anything so small bleed before in my life. At this point, some alarm bells began ringing. Strange looking mole-check. Growing-check. Bleeding-check. So back I went to the doctors, where I categorically asked him if he thought it was skin cancer, to be told that there was no chance of it being so. So back on with my life I went, waiting for my appointment, a further month away.

By the time my appointment came round, I was just ready to get rid of the unsightly thing on my arm.





I rocked up to my appointment, Mom and Nan in tow, to be told immediately that it was a 'pyogenic granuloma' and when I read about it afterwards, it made perfect sense. So the mole was removed, sewed up and I was sent on my way. End of story. Well, thats what I thought, but it was barely the beginning...

We went home for Christmas, and had a lovely time. On boxing day I went to my grandparents where I started to notice that the wound on my arm had started weeping and being generally unpleasant. I put it down to putting some moisturiser on it, as I was told to. But over the next few days it got nastier and nastier and at one point, the stitches started pulling through my skin. So In my boyfriends bathroom, me, him and his mom performed a DIY stitch removal with some nail scissors and tweezers, as they were just making the whole area worse. With these gone, the wound had a chance to start healing and eventually started to settle down. I had been told that if I didn't hear anything within a month, not to worry. So after a month of not hearing anything, just assumed there was nothing to hear. After another visit to the doctor to tell him of my concern that the wound was swelling up again, he told me it was probably just a stitch and to leave it be.

2 weeks later, on 3rd February, I got a phone call from the hospital saying that I needed to see someone ASAP about the results from the tests I'd had done. My immediate thought was that it meant I had cancer. But as I went through the day, I realised that I'd sent of some nail clippings from a weird toe I'd had forever, so managed to convince myself it was something to do with that. I rang them back, and they arranged an appointment for the next morning. I knew something had to be really wrong then-the NHS never move that fast!! Unless it's serious...

Lying awake that night, failing to fall asleep, I said to Richard that things would never be the same again, but I didn't know how right I would be.

The next morning we made our way to the hospital, arriving 30 minutes early for the appointment. When we got there, they took me straight through and sat me down-what happened to the hour long wait?! Being told you have cancer is like no other experience on earth, and something you can't really explain. It is the biggest combination of shock, fear, sadness and dread. The doctor who told me could probably do with a few lessons in bedside manner, as when I sat down he just blurted it out, then asked if I wanted my boyfriend with me (I've always thought the wrong way round!) I said yes, and in Richard was brought to be told the same news I had. I was completely speechless. I had vaguely entertained the thought that it might be cancer, but never had I thought it would actually be that. We sat in silence as appointments were made for me, facts were told. It was only when I was offered a coffee and given a leaflet on malignant melanoma that I started to realise what was going on.

We went home, both dumbstruck at what had just happened and I was faced with ringing my parents to tell them what was going on-not an experience I'd like to repeat. I had been given an appointment for the following Monday with my plastic surgeon, which my parents were going to come to, so we were sent home for a weekend of fuzziness. I was actually in the middle of rehearsing for a show, so not knowing what else to do, I went to all day rehearsals on the Saturday and the Sunday, before my parents arrived on the Sunday night. We stayed up late to watch the Super Bowl, but after that failed to grab my attention (how long does it go on for?!) I decided to go to bed, ready for whatever would happen the next day.

Our first trip to the hospital together as a family was certainly an interesting one. We were introduced to the plastic surgeon, Mr. Stanley, who explained what they had found, what it meant and what was going to happen next. The lump that they had removed was 4.08 mm thick, which put me in a high risk category for it having spread else where. The first place the cancer usually stopped off was your lymph nodes, which are under your arms, neck and groin. Therefore, I was to have a wider local excision (WLE) around the original mole and a sentinel lymph-node biopsy (SLNB) to see if it had indeed spread to the lymphs. This was all to happen after some blood tests, an admissions test and a ct scan...

Leaving the hospital on that cold February afternoon, we knew a very long road lay ahead of us, and none of us really knew what to expect...




Me and my amazing parents!





The most wonderful boyfriend I could ever ask for
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Overture

Hello everyone, and welcome to my blog :)

This year, 2012, after a particularly nasty 2011, I have promised myself that I am going to make it count. 2011 made me realise how fragile life really is, and that you only get one. This year I intend to do lots of things I have always wanted to, things I might not have ever considered and things that just take my fancy. This blog will serve as a kind of diary of what goes on, but also updates on treatment, reviews, anything that takes my fancy I guess! Through this blog, I hope to be able to give other people hope, that life CAN continue after a cancer diagnosis-and it can be a good one!

So, why was 2011 so horrific you may be asking??

Well, in February 2011, I was diagnosed with stage 3 malignant melanoma. What followed was an intense string of tests, scans, operations. My cancer story so far will be another post on here, so of you want all the gory details that is the place to look ;)

When it looked like the year couldn't get much bleaker, my beloved Nan, Floss, passed away at the end of October.

These events, along with witnessing the death of other acquaintances and having my eyes opened to the world of cancer and other suffered has made me determined to make the most of life, and try to get this message across to other people :)

That is enough rambling!

Take a look at my other posts as and when they arrive, and remember to make it count!

Love,

Phoebe x