Finding out - the diagnosis.

The diagnosis blew me away. It came as a complete shock. Because the tumour was deep inside my chest, there were no symptoms, none of the lumps or bumps that you would usually associate with cancer. I was 25, I didn’t smoke. I didn’t think I was a candidate for cancer. I had lost a bit of weight – maybe half a stone - but I had been eating healthily, going to the gym, taking yoga classes. I had been a bit more tired than usual, going to bed early, but I had a stressful job, working as a journalist in Sydney, Australia.

So how did I find out I had cancer? Well I had been living in Australia for two years. The newspaper I worked for had sponsored me to stay in the country for four years but I decided to apply for residency so I could live there if I chose to when my visa expired. The Department of Immigration demanded a medical exam which included a chest x-ray to rule out TB.

So on September 11 2001, of all days, I got a call from a doctor at the Department of Immigration, telling me he needed to see me. Just hours before the first plane hit the World Trade Centre the doctor showed me what looked like to me to be a harmless grey cloud in my chest. He told me it was abnormal. Worst case scenario he said was a really aggressive tumour and he laughed and I laughed because I thought there was no way I could have something like cancer.

But I should have noticed how nervous his laugh was and that he couldn’t look me in the eye. I saw my GP hours later. He pencilled me in for a CT scan first thing in the morning. I should have known something serious was wrong when I saw his reaction to my x-ray. But I was in complete denial. I simply didn’t associate myself with cancer. Like everybody else I thought it couldn’t happen to me. Maybe it was my brain’s way of protecting myself from the trauma that lay ahead.

The next morning the world was focused on September 11. As awful as it sounds, with all the people who died in New York, it was merely a distraction for me. I went for the CT scan alone. I told my boyfriend to go to work – he was a journalist and I knew he would have to cover the biggest news story of the decade. I think I was also trying to convince myself myself that this was nothing. I felt if it wasn’t serious then I could go it alone. Of course my family in Ireland - they realised the gravity of the situation and they were hysterical but I wouldn’t listen to them. I did get upset as lay under the CT machine so deep down I think I knew something serious was wrong.

While I waited for the results of the scan, I remember thinking this would all turn out to be nothing, that I’d be back in the office the next day and my work colleagues would all think I was a hypochondriac. Instead when I opened the report it read “possible lymphoma”. Thank God I didn’t know what that was and when I called my boyfriend in the office and asked him what it was, he lied and said his internet server wasn’t working. So I went straight back to my GP and I asked him what a lymphoma was.

He didn’t have the courage to say cancer so he said it was an abnormal growth of cells. I asked how it could be treated, he said chemo. I instantly thought, not about death, but about my hair. My boyfriend was with me and he mentioned Hodgkins and non-Hodgkins and I was terrified then. I had lost a good friend at college to non-Hodgkins. But my GP interrupted him, telling me it was probably nothing serious, that it would more than likely be nothing. I think he was wrong to give me false hope but I clung to it. He told me to bring my files straight to a chest surgeon. My boyfriend dropped me at the hospital and went back to work. Realistically I had just been told I probably had cancer and I shouldn’t have been left alone but I think we were still in major denial. Also on account of 9/11 he was under a lot of pressure at work. He was writing the front page story for the paper. The surgeon said he would see me that day, and again this should have made me realise this was serious. I waited two hours and when I saw him he reminded me of a slick doctor from ER. He looked at my scan, then the report and without even looking up he said “we need to get in there, get a piece of it and see if it is treatable. But it looks like cancer.”

I will never forget those words. I realised I might die. I struggled to hold back the tears. Looking back the way he treated me was appalling. I was alone, an Irish girl on the other side of the world from family and friends. It was raining when I walked out of the hospital and I called my boyfriend to come and get me. I just stood there in the rain crying and crying. People were staring at me. When he came, I just broke down. I sobbed in his arms telling him over and over again I didn’t want to die. He just held me and told me he didn’t want me to die either.

My family was devastated. My father picked up the phone when I rang and when I told him they thought it was Hodgkins or something like that he just handed the phone to my mother and walked out of the room. She told me later he aged in that moment before her very eyes. It must be one of the worst things any parent can be told, that their child has cancer. So began two weeks of mind games as I waited for a diagnosis. The tumour was difficult to reach because it was close to some of my organs. There was an unsuccessful needle biopsy and in the end I needed general surgery. We kept telling ourselves it couldn’t be cancer, I was too healthy, and my GP kept insisting it could be a million other conditions besides cancer.

My boyfriend’s support was unending through those long weeks of waiting. Two weeks to the day I was shown my x-ray for the first time, the same chest surgeon told me over the phone I had Hodgkins Disease. The conversation is a blur. No-one should ever be told they have cancer over the phone. He didn’t even ask if I had anyone with me. Luckily my boyfriend was there.

Two days later I saw my haematologist for the first time. He was amazing and I have to add that every other nurse and doctor I came into contact with from that day was just as understanding. He told me he wouldn’t just treat me he would cure me. And I believed him. Strangely enough, probably because of the denial I was in, the only time I actually thought I might die was when I had seen the chest surgeon two weeks earlier. It took another week of tests to stage the Hodgkins including the dreaded bone marrow test. In the end they weren’t sure if I was stage one or two but the tumour was classed as bulky so I would be treated as stage 3. That meant six months of a chemo *bleep*tail called ABVD and one month of radiation.

It was difficult because no-one could tell me what caused the Hodgkins. I wondered if it was my fault. Was I so stressed out in my job that my immune system had become damaged leaving me susceptible to cancer? I began to stress about being stressed. It was a vicious circle. But eventually I learned to eliminate stress, not to avoid cancer, but because a stress free life is a happy life.

{mospagebreak title=The Treatment} 

The treatment

The treatment was tough because I walked into that chemo room a healthy 25 year old. It took three hours to pump the four chemo drugs into my body and at the end of it I could hardly walk out of the room I was so so sick. I can only describe it as my very worst hangover multiplied by a million. And that’s an understatement. Then there was the nausea and the constipation that no drug could ease. The sickness would last for four or five days and because chemo has a cumulative effect I became sicker with each treatment.

I was told there was a 50 50 chance I would lose my hair and I clung to the 50% chance that I would keep it. It was a major concern for me. I cut my shoulder length hair into a bob and for the first two months things were looking good. Then it began to get thin. Because it thinned from the top of my head, I hid it first by tying it up, then by wearing a bandana. In the end, while I never went completely bald, I had to wear a wig. I know some people do not mind the baldness but I was devastated. To me it was a physical sign that I was ill, a label to the outside world that I had cancer. I would look in the mirror and the person looking back at me was a stranger. She was a very sick stranger. The fact was, while I knew the treatment would come to an end and the sickness would be over, I knew it would take at least three years to have my long hair back.

I also struggled with the treatment because I continued to work. I would take three or four days off for chemo. I know I was lucky to be treated as an out patient but it was very difficult for me to try to pretend to be part of the real world, to watch people living normal lives when my whole world was turned upside down. I would sit in the office and stare at people’s hair. I would look at them and wonder if I was like them once before too, without a care in the world. As the months went on I was so sick and too exhausted to work – I couldn’t concentrate - but I kept going in. I didn’t want to let anyone down, from my employer to myself. It’s hard to explain but I felt if I was still working then I couldn’t be that sick. I also felt that if people knew that I was still working, they wouldn’t think the cancer had “got” me.

Peoples’ reactions to my cancer were difficult. Many were morbid, treating me as if I was about to die. The rumour back home in Ireland was that there was no hope for me. Then there was the other extreme, people who kept telling me to be positive, that I was lucky. In my mind I was lucky in the cancer world in that I could be cured, but unlucky in the real world because I got cancer in the first place. The people who told me to stop getting upset over my hair, to stop being vain, that it was only hair, that it would grow back, only made me more upset.

I had my good days and my bad days and on one of the bad days I remember a work colleague telling me to snap out of it, that I should be skipping into chemo because it was doing me good. Some people, like that work colleague, once they knew it was curable, acted like I had a bad flu. People simply need to treat cancer for what it is, a serious illness, not a death sentence. The fighting spirit and positive attitude I had when I began chemo began to fade as the months went on.

There were days when I didn’t want to get out of bed and I discovered at an LSI meeting when I came back to Ireland, that one of the chemo drugs I was given can cause temporary depression. It explained my low frame of mind through the long months of chemo. On top of that the chemo suppressed my ovaries. Thankfully it was temporary and I can have children, but I went through a menopause, mood swings, unbearable hot flushes – the works. The problem was I was never told I was going through the menopause. I worked it out for myself when I read an article about the menopause in a magazine. A fertility expert told me afterwards that if I had been given the pill it would have stopped the side effects of the menopause.

So with cancer came chemo, depression, hair loss and menopause. But it wasn’t all bad. My mother was my shining light. She flew to Sydney when I decided to have my treatment there so I could keep working and have a normal routine. She stayed with me for seven long months, on the other side of the world from my father. They are never apart so it was an incredible sacrifice for them both. My father came to visit, so did my sister. And there were constant phone calls from my brother. My boyfriend was at my side for every treatment, every check-up. Cancer shows you the people who really love you most in the world. I moved home to Ireland six months after my treatment to be closer to my family.

Then there were the friends I made in the chemo room, other people with cancer, some of whom I heartbreakingly lost to the disease. And when I came home I found LSI, an incredible source of support.

{mospagebreak title=The Recovery!} 

The recovery!

It took a while for my body to get over the fatigue that comes with chemo and radiation. I tried to go back to full time work immediately afterwards but my body couldn’t do it. I needed time out and I took a few months off when I came home to Ireland. Now I am two years in remission. There are still overwhelming fears of recurrence, every pain or ache - in my mind - is a tumour, but the people at LSI tell me that will ease over the years. To be honest I’m not sure how well I would cope if it came back but I am staying positive.

Now all I want to do is help other people with cancer, and to raise cancer awareness and thereby increase early detection because the earlier the disease is diagnosed the greater the chance there is of a cure. I also want to get the word out there that cancer is not a death sentence. Before my own diagnosis I thought you could get rid of cancer but it would always come back to get you. It was only after my own diagnosis that I remembered all the other people who had cancer and were so fit and well I had forgotten they were ever sick. A fear and a stigma surrounds cancer because we know it can be life threatening, we don’t always know what causes it and any one of us can get it. That stigma can be very damaging to the person with cancer. But I have no regrets.

I thought my life was over the day I was told I had cancer but it turned out to be a new beginning for me. I learned so much about myself; found an inner strength I never knew I had. Cancer has put a new perspective on my life. When you face your mortality you realise that nothing else really matters. I listen to my friends moan about cellulite or freak out about hitting 30 and I just laugh. I can’t wait to be 30 and be cancer free.

Sometimes I get sucked into the minor stresses that come with life but I am able to stop myself now and think just how lucky I am to be alive.

                                                                                                            Vickie,

                                                                                                            October 2003

If you would like to ask Vickie a question about her illness and treatment, click below;

                         Contact Vickie