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 7th
of January 2013, I was told I had Alveolar Soft Part Sarcoma. I was relieved – we all were, but more on that
later...
