For me, it all started with blood in my urine and an increase in the size of my stomach. In retrospect, I could feel the mucin moving when I walked. Now I’m on ‘watch and wait’.
When I had abdominal pain and a small hard lump to the left, thought to be IBS playing up and that I needed to get it under control. It wasn’t that simple.
After my ruptured appendix was removed, the surgeon said the operation “took a little longer, it was messy in there.” For the follow-up, he called me in earlier to give me the bad news.
Initially, I had flu-like symptoms with pain in all the joints in my body followed by bad abdominal pain that did not go away.
My local hospital happens to be the centre in Israel for treating this disease and two of the surgeons working there have extensive experience in performing cytoreductive surgery and HIPEC. To those of you have undergone this procedure, I don’t need to say more. If you are still recovering or about to undergo it, I wish you excellent care, strength, patience, and a complete recovery.
I had an ultrasound which showed a large tumour which was confirmed by MRI. I had surgery at my local hospital to remove a tumour the size of a football and my diagnosis of pseudomyxoma peritonei (PMP) was confirmed.
On March 1st 2016, I was admitted to hospital with abdominal pain and operated on the next day. The surgeon found a tumour in my appendix and mucin throughout my abdomen. My story is about what happened next, my surgery, coping with the stress and the positives that came out of it.
Four years ago, I had to give up my ticket to watch the London Olympics to go to a hospital appointment and be told I had PMP and had only ‘a few months’ if Basingstoke could not offer me CRS and HIPEC. Now I’m in Rio!
The last year and a half has been a profound and unmooring experience, and one I turn over in my mind with gratitude, disbelief, and amazement.
It’s tough being only 20 years old and an appendix cancer patient at that. Mainly because no one expects or even wants to believe you could even end up developing cancer, and the worst culprits are medical professionals. True, the odds are so low it’s a waste of time to even bother, but that ‘waste of time’ could have cost me my life!
On February 2nd, 2011, my appendix burst and I had an operation in Burton-on-Trent. I was 36. On March 7th, I received a letter from the hospital saying I’d missed a follow-up appointment for a suspected case of PMP. I hadn’t received the original letter and just what was PMP? I looked it up on the internet.
After an elderly relative was admitted to hospital with gallstones and, after researching her symptoms online, I was convinced I had the same problem. I pestered my GP to refer me for an ultrasound which eventually showed I had no gallstones, but “a fair amount” of fluid around my liver.