Life before diagnosis

My life as a whole has been pretty colourful, to tell you about it all would take a whole other blog entirely! Maybe it would be a splog - seriously prolonged log! So I’ll just bring you to the present time.

So, I live with Mark, the girls and our dog Alfie. I work at the main hospital in Middlesbrough. After lots of years of nursing and training I became an ACCP (advanced critical care practitioner) working within the critical care department. Best way to describe it for people who don’t know the role is we formulate part of the medical rota within critical care, doing some pretty cool stuff and working with some pretty cool people. I also work as an aesthetic nurse practitioner, doing Botox and the like. Here, I get to work with one of the most beautiful souls on the planet, my amazing friend Jane (cue some harp playing!).

Anyway you could say life was just going on (as it does!). I love a holiday (or 6!) and I love both my jobs. I have a wonderful family, some cracking friends and brilliant colleagues. Life was pretty bloody amazing, until…….

In April, I started to get some pain in my upper abdomen on the right hand side. Being all the F’s (fair, female, fertile, forty - not quite, fat - not quite). Both me and my GP thought this was likely gallstones. Pain was pretty bad at this point. So off I go for an ultrasound scan and hope that I can find some lovely surgeon to remove my gallbladder. Turns out I found an absolute star of one in the form of Mr Wael Elsaify. My ultrasound scan was done and in came the results. Couple of gallstones, nothing else major but a right sided moderate pleural effusion (fluid around the lung). I thought at this point the effusion was likely reactive to gallstones, because thats what had been causing the pain, right??

He seemed very concerned about the effusion and thought a respiratory physician should probably take a look. At the time I felt frustrated and thought he would just whip out my gallbladder so I could go back to work!! (How naive I was!!). So I am then liaising with the respiratory team and the absolutely amazing Dr Rehan Mustafa (I had worked with Rehan in my previous roles as ward manager and respiratory nurse).

From this point I had the fluid drained, all 1000 mls of it (sounds more dramatic than a litre!), my hands held by Emma (Asthma nurse specialist and my friend). It’s worth pointing out that at this point and onwards, I thought this was bad, but I kept that to myself. Cytology then came back clear. Concerns followed that in women my age, a pleural effusion (in the absence of any other pathology) can be caused by ovarian cancer. Had a few weeks of being concerned over this (generally by the time it causes an effusion it’s at an advanced stage). This was cleared up by gynaecology after a further ultrasound scan and an MRI scan. In the meantime I had a further chest x-ray which showed the effusion had ’filled up again’.

I was then forwarded on to the thoracic team (4 teams and counting now!). Under the care of the fabulous Mr Ian Paul. I went into hospital and had a Right VAT (Video Assisted Thoracoscopy), biopsy and talc pleurodesis at the end of July. I was cared for by some amazing people including the fab thoracic nurses. It was only a couple of days after discharge I was called back to see the consultant for the biopsy results, and asked to bring someone with me (dum, dum, duuum! anyone who knows, knows this is never a good sign), and then it happened. On the 5th August 2021 our world came crashing down around us, ‘it is cancer, it’s mesothelioma’.