Quick Background

September 2014 

I have just turned 29 and my husband and I have begun our fourth year of UK life. I am working in a haematology lab at a hospital 10 miles from our Brighton flat. I’ve had the job for 4 months or so. Prior to that, I had been commuting from Brighton to London every day. Yes, I was one of those. I am sorry. I hate it as much as you do. My job (or career, call it what you will) is to analyse blood. I look at the numbers produced by the analyser, I look at the cells via a microscope, and then I think about the medical explanations for what I am seeing. My current hospital is not a bad place to work; although the analysers and systems are outdated they are, at least, about to be replaced. I get along with most of the staff, I have even made a couple of friends. I have learned a new speciality and the job itself is not so hard.

But I feel exhausted. I am asleep on the couch by 7pm. Once in bed, the bouts of uncontrollable shivering and intense lower back pain beginging from a vertebra behind my pelvis and radiating in both directions – are leading to rather restless nights. Ibuprofen is becoming a regular part of my daily routine. Some work friends have started asking where my previously totally awesome attitude has gone. Ok, maybe it was never that awesome. Let’s just say my crankiness hadn't, as I had hoped, gone unnoticed, and requests are being made to lock and load a good PMA (positive mental attitude). 

October 2014

I am finishing work breathless. I stop cycling to work as I am too tired to maintain it. I commend myself on my notable weight loss just from my casual cycling to work. Good for me. The shivering at night is becoming a little more frequent. I hide under a lab bench and fight off tears when an analyser doesn't do as I want it to. Maybe I am taking things a bit too personally. I decided to give blood (why did I think that was a good idea???). I can’t give blood because I am anaemic. I book a GP appointment. I get a cold and a cough.

November 2014

Night shivers are every night and most afternoons during work hours. I am a zomboid at work. Weight loss is being noticed by other people. However, my life is almost sedentary and I have no appetite. My cough has not resolved but I am not coughing up anything nasty. I get a gum infection. I get a chest infection. Antibiotics are not helping my shivers, and I am starting to sweat during the night. My husband has taken to sleeping on the couch because I am disturbing him too much. Third GP visit and I get to have a chest x-ray. 

December 2014

The only work out my gym clothes are getting is during the night to mop up my sweats. I am changing my shirt 3 to 4 times a night. My rigors are six hourly; or whenever the ritual paracetamol runs out. I can take paracetamol now because I have lost my desire for beer. Shit, I must be unwell.  A change in antibiotics has not relieved any symptoms. Coughing doesn’t produce anything except a need to vomit (sorry guys, but I am sure this blog is going to get grosser). And is that a dull pain in my right side? Yes, I think that is a dull pain in my right side. How long has that been there? Maybe a while – I can’t really remember. Another call to the GP. A trip to A&E. A reluctant trip. 

Hospital

The fever I claim to have is a whopping 37°C but my reliable blood results (yay that’s my job) do confirm that I am not quite right. A pretty clued up young triage Dr decided my abdominal pain didn’t make sense so sent me for an ultrasound. My liver was red on the ultrasound, which I thought meant angry (oh no my beer!), but no. Red means blood flow and, as it turns out, the liver wasn’t red enough. They suspect a liver abscess. I am assured that this is unrelated to alcohol consumption. I am assigned to the surgery team. 
A CT scan is performed the following day. My overnight shivers freaked out the surgical based nurses, and were not overly appreciated by my ward mates. About 3 days later a rather brisk but likeable surgical consultant with a paintbrush moustache bustles into the ward followed by a cluster of junior surgeons. “I need to feel your neck, armpit and groin.” Me – “Oh? What is it, lymphoma?” Paintbrush moustache -“What? What do you know about lymphoma? Are you a doctor?” (Fortunately a nurse here filled in the blanks for him) Paintbrush moustache – “Ok well the CT scan shows swollen lymph nodes in your abdomen I need to refer you to another team. Is it the haematology department?” Me – “Yes it is haematology.”

OK, so it is my job to know about lymphoma, but I must confess that lymphoma was a weak point in my knowledge. Here is what I did know:

• I knew at that point that I probably had lymphoma. Fatigue, unexplained weight-loss, night sweats, alcohol induced pain, itchy skin: the symptoms all matched up. The only thing missing was a visible swollen lymph node.

• At my age I was most likely to have Hodgkin’s Lymphoma

• Hodgkin’s Lymphoma has giant cells (Reed-Sternberg cells) that have two oval nuclei that look like owl eyes when you see them down the microscope and they look really cool (OK I had to nerd out a little…)

• Hodgkin’s Lymphoma was probably the best cancer to have.  

This entry is much longer than I had planned, and the rest will probably be summed up in later posts, so I will make it very quick – a CT scan, a bone marrow trephine, a bone marrow biopsy, a couple more ultrasounds, a lymph node biopsy, a plasma transfusion and a blood transfusion later; I was discharged at 8pm on Christmas Eve, and had a confirmed (by then it was all set in my mind anyway) Hodgkin's Lymphoma diagnosis the following week. On the first working day of 2015, I officially became a cancer patient.