My Cancer Experience: Part One - Discovering A Problem

As I mentioned briefly in my first new post, I will be blogging about my experience with Cancer.

I will divide this over a few posts about the stags I personally experienced: 

Finding out, Diagnosis, Treatment, Life after cancer and any tips I can think of for family, friends and patients 

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So my story begins:

In Early 2012, I was working a full time job at River Island. It was a different role abit more physically than I was used to. I noticed that I was losing weight even though nothing in my diet had really changed. I put this down to the fact that I was now running up and down 6 flights of stairs about 16+ times a day and moving heavy boxes of clothes around.
One of my friends literally said to me once 'What is going on with you, you look anorexic' looking back now I did look ill but as I see myself every day I didn't really notice.

Shortly after this I developed a pain in my diaphragm (just where your ribs stop in the middle) and I had developed a pea sized lump under my left armpit. It was hard and I could move it around.

Growing up it has been promoted to teenage girls to get any lump checked out, so I went down to my local NHS walk in centre as I wasn't yet registered at a local doctor due to moving house.

The doctor advised me that the pain in my diaphragm was Indigestion and the lump was breast change. Being 22 at this point I was silently sure that I knew this wasn't right and that I'd hit puberty long enough ago to know what 'Breast change' would feel like.

But this person is a qualified doctor who am I to question them, so off I went with my prescription for Gaviscon.

Six months later after completing the prescribed Gaviscon and 2 stone lighter than I had been most of my life. I still had the Lump, the diaphragm pain and I had now developed a dry cough which had lasted months, no flu symptoms etc.

So I returned to the same doctors as they had previously seen me for this problem.. again the prescribed me another course of Gaviscon. I took this home but I did not carry out the course as I was positive I was being mis-diagnosed.

A week after my 23rd birthday I woke up to a crushing pain feeling like I was being pushed in my back and chest at the same time. I took myself to A&E where I under went a CT scan and had to stay over night. The next day I was diagnosed with having Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Which I would later find out that I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma (Blood cancer) at stage 2 and that had I been brought in a year earlier when I first went to the NHS walk in centre I may have been at an earlier stage.

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My next post's will be about: My experience with telling other people, treatment and the aftermath.