My cancer story

The story of how I was diagnosed with cancer is not conventional in any shape or form. No finding a lump, no anomaly in a blood test, no symptoms, it came out of the blue. And changed my life forever.

In September 2017, I was on a school trip to Beamish in Durham with the class of children I taught.  Beamish is a historical museum, a town reincarnated to represent how it was. The class and I had visited a house, a train station and were now preparing to go down the mine by donning safety helmets with lights. Down the mine, at the furthest point from the surface, I caught my helmet on a beam in the roof, causing my foot to catch against a rail beneath me and tripped, falling over in the process. When I tried to get up, I realised something was badly wrong; the top of my leg was wobbling and I was unable to get up. The children were very concerned, and I had to pretend all was well, so as not to alarm them. In reality, I was terrified. Several staff were called to assess the situation and I had to be carried from the mine by Evac-Chair. My leg was swelling quickly, so an ambulance was called. In no time at all, a paramedic appeared. Gate staff had spotted a training vehicle and asked them to come and see me.  By this time, my leg was even bigger and my jeans had to be cut open. It took the ambulance half an hour to arrive and strangely, I felt no pain. 

Transfer from the Evac-Chair to an ambulance trolley was bad enough; when the leg was put in traction, I thought I might just hit the roof of the ambulance. On a scale of 1-10, I’d put it at 20! Because of this, there was a further delay as morphine was delivered from another ambulance. Staff from school kept walking by and I just waved, pretending everything was fine.  By now, I was using gas and air frequently, as the pain was intense. Shock had set in and my whole body was shaking, my teeth were chattering. An injection of morphine was now administered, and we were able to get on our way, slowly initially because of the cobbles on the way out of Beamish. Morphine had taken over my brain and all I remember on arrival at the hospital was passing lights as we went down a corridor, something like you’d expect on a hospital drama. Faces standing over me asked for information from the ambulance staff, but everything was blurry from my point of view. After another painful transfer to a hospital bed, a doctor arrived. My leg was x-rayed at my bedside and the doctor asked lots of questions about my health and how I had fallen, as he had seen x-rays like this before, but usually if a person had a motorbike crash at 70mph, not an innocuous fall.
I was transferred to a ward for femoral nail surgery the following morning. However, the operation didn’t happen as the orthopaedic surgeon said they needed to investigate why my leg had broken so easily. I remember him saying there was a small chance it could be cancer, but that it was unlikely. Even though it had been said, I thought it would be something else, osteoporosis or please something else. During the next couple of days, I had a full-body bone scan, a CT scan of my body, a MRI of my leg, x-rays of my chest and various blood tests. These were the most painful experience so far.  Each separate visit involved a team of people to slide me from one bed to another. Each was excruciatingly painful. No amount of morphine means that you do not feel the grating of broken bones.

When Mr. Gregory, the orthopaedic surgeon returned with a cast of doctors later in the day and drew the curtains around my bed, I knew the news would not be good. The curtains seemed to draw in like the walls were retreating. I had kidney cancer and a further tumour on my femur bone, which had caused the break. Nothing prepares you for the devastation of a cancer diagnosis. The world stops, your mouth dries up so it feels like a desert, you can’t comprehend words any more. The surgeons carried on speaking, but I was no longer listening. My whole life has been defined by cancer; my mum spent the first sixteen years of my life battling the bloody thing, until she died. Now I had it and life was never going to be the same again.