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.