The Consultation.

The consultation began rather confusingly. The consultant, clearly a very busy man with no time for small talk or getting acquainted, jumped straight into the diagnosis. ‘Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma,’ he informed us, to which Faisal straight away asked, ‘So it’s not an Ewing’s sarcoma?’ Ewing's Sarcoma, for those who are not aware, is a much more aggressive and more common type of sarcoma.

‘No,’ he said, and we all breathed a sigh of relief. ‘It’s a very rare type of cancer...’ he continued, ‘...so rare in fact, that we don’t really have much information on it. What we do know, though, is that it is immune to chemotherapy and radiotherapy.’

‘Immune to chemotherapy?’ I didn’t completely understand. This was cancer we were talking about, wasn’t it? If chemotherapy was ineffective, what was he proposing we do?

 ‘What does this mean?’ Dad asked.

‘It means we don’t really have any options...’ the consultant trailed off.

‘Is it operable?’ Faisal asked.

‘I’m afraid it’s a bit more complicated than simply removing it. Because of the location and size of the tumour, we’d have to carry out a full hindquarter amputation.’

‘Woaw’ I thought, ‘that sounds painful.’ A hindquarter amputation would mean the removal of the left side of my pelvis, and my whole left leg, he explained. I gulped, trying not to cry. ‘Yeah, okay, maybe painful is a little bit of an understatement.' 

‘...even then, it won’t be as effective as we would like. The cancer has spread to the lungs, and there are innumerable lung metastases which we can do nothing about.’

‘Innumerable lung mets?!’ I thought panicking, looking around the room. This was the first time I was hearing of it, although judging by Faisal’s reaction, he clearly knew from beforehand.

I fell back into my seat, silent for the remainder of the consultation. Dad and Faisal asked a lot of questions, and although the lack of treatment options was bleak, the consultant informed us this was a very slow growing cancer, and patients had lived for decades with it. ‘Finally, some good news.’

And so we left the consultant’s room in relatively high spirits. Despite being told of the lack of treatment options, I had dodged a bullet. A major bullet.  The cancer I had was not an aggressive one - there was that silver lining I had heard an awful lot about. We were all relieved. Dad was even chatty, something he had not been since hearing of my diagnosis. I had hardly heard two sentences from him since telling him, his quietness and withdrawn nature just as painful as the hour long phone calls from mum, during which she did nothing but cry.

But we had hope now. Little, very little, but still, it was there. More than anything, I had not been given a specific time period in which I should expect to die, and to me, that was enough for now...

Lessons of the Day:
-One of my favourite quotes is from the Qur'an, which states; 'Certainly, with every hardship, comes ease', and the more I think about it, the more ease we have been given. Going into the consultation, we were all sure I had an Ewing's sarcoma, and if that were the case, I wouldn't be alive today. 

- There is always a silver lining – even in the bleakest situations. You just have to look for it, and once you find it, hold onto it and let that be the thing which guides you and gets you through your time of difficulty. 

The Brave Girl vs The Bitter Girl

“You’re so brave and free-spirited!” I smiled sadly at my friend, sipping on some more coffee. How I wish that were true, I thought to myself.

You see, I seem to have lost all hope. Now, don’t get too worried about me –I do this often; I will pursue a potential cure for my illness, get my hopes up high, see them dashed, cry for a day or two, and then go back to square one. And I will find something else, and I will get my hopes up again, only to see them crumble once again. It’s a vicious cycle, and more often than not, one that leads me toward a spout of depression, during which I will lose all hope, do nothing, feel nothing but sorry for myself and the situation I find myself in, and perhaps most pronounced of all, I will feel this overwhelming sense of bitterness toward everything and everyone. I write this week's post on the back end of one of these episodes, and so I apologise in advance for the upsetting post.

Bitterness. It’s not a great feeling, and unfortunately for me, it’s a feeling I feel all too often. I see my friends and family achieve so much in their lives, both professional and personal, and I will feel so proud and happy for them, and then within a split second, I will feel bitterness – not toward them or their achievement, but toward myself and my debilitating situation which leaves me unable to accomplish what I once hoped to. My friends have gone on to accomplish so much since completing our degrees – they’ve found jobs, having completed PGCs and Masters, and what have I done with my degree? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. My certificate is filed away in a folder, of no use to anyone. I started a second degree in Islamic Studies, completed one semester, and then found out I was starting chemotherapy, and so that project got shelved too. Nothing seems to amount to anything, and it’s a very depressing situation to be in.

And that’s nothing compared to the personal turmoil Faisal and I find ourselves in. Our lives have screeched to a halt, and where we see all our friends move on with their lives, get married, have children, we find ourselves stuck. Anyone who knows me even a little bit, knows the one thing I wanted most in life – to be a mum. And it’s that one thing which seems like it’s never going to happen. I see pregnant women in town or pass a shop displaying children’s clothes and I’m reminded of the greatest loss this diagnosis has brought me. And on particularly bad days, I sit and do nothing but cry, and even that doesn’t help. The longing is worse than the bitterness, the fear outweighs every ounce of bravery and the bleak future overshadows any hope.

And then it’s time to go out into the world again, and I wipe away the tears and once again put on this facade of the brave, free-spirited girl who just happens to be fighting cancer.

Lesson of the Day:

- I have no lesson this week – if I did, I would be the first to implement it and you wouldn’t be reading this rather depressing post. But this week has just been one of those weeks – where you just don’t feel like fighting anymore, and rather than pretend like it's been anything else, I thought I'd write honestly. Here's hoping next week is better. 

The Diagnosis.

Perhaps the most frequently asked question I get when I tell people I have cancer is ‘How did you find out?’, and although the answer makes for dull reading, I imagine a few of my readers have the same question. But before I get into that, I must warn you: this post will be neither entertaining nor particularly interesting to some (or most, although I hope not).

Looking back, it’s hard to pinpoint an exact moment when I started feeling unwell, rather, there are a number of instances which come to mind, the timeline of each being somewhat muddled up in my mind. The first instance that comes to mind is before I set out for Race For Life with a group of friends - ironic isn't it? Me running (and by running, I of course mean walking leisurely, because let’s face it, I hadn’t run since Secondary School) for raising money and awareness for cancer, whilst my own one remained undiagnosed. I had been complaining of leg pains before the race, and was quite hesitant to participate, although I did manage to finish in the end. That was in the summer of 2012.

Final Year University began in September 2012, and as the course progressed, I found myself attending less and less. Now, it’s unfair for me to blame my lack of attendance solely on my leg pains – I had been to two different universities, and both sets of friends will attest to the fact that I hardly ever attended any lectures and was, as one so eloquently put it, ‘a lazy butt’. But as final year continued, they began seeing me only once a fortnight, and in some cases, even less frequently than that. By the end of first semester, around November 2012, I was in so much pain I could hardly walk at all, let alone make the walk to and from the train station and attend lectures on top of that.

It was then that we decided to see a doctor. Now, a lot of people may ask why I had left it so long – from the first instance of feeling leg pains to the point of complete immobility around 4-5 months had elapsed, during which time the pain never really went away. The simple truth of the matter is this – when you’re 21, the last thing on your mind is cancer, and the last place you want to be is in a hospital. We put the pain down to sciatic pain and a generally unhealthy lifestyle – like I said before, I hadn’t run in over 3/4years, ate the most unhealthy of foods, and was generally, to quote my friend, ‘a lazy butt’.

And so in November 2012, when the pain was at its worst, I finally went to the GP, and the next thing I knew, I was being scanned left, right and centre. I had ultrasounds, X-Rays, CT scans, MRI scans and a number of examinations by a number of different doctors, but no one could figure out what was wrong with me. All I was told was that I had a ‘mass’ in my pelvis. I distinctly remember walking past an ‘Oncology’ signboard at the hospital and thinking to myself ‘dear God, please don’t let it be cancer’, although deep down somewhere, I knew it was. Finally, after a month of tests, I was referred to The Royal Orthopaedic Hospital for a biopsy, and later, on the 7^th of January 2013, I was told I had Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma. I was relieved – we all were, but more on that later...