It's not my story, nor am I a doctor, but I think this is a story that needs to be told because it true and rather scary. I do not know all the details and my memory is not the best, so I'm taking parts that I remember, as well as parts from her blog and Facebook posts.
My cousin, who is approaching her twenty first birthday began having pains in her back and shoulder around this time last year. At the time she just figured she had injured herself, so she took some painkillers and that was that. The pain was, in her words, "intermittent," she would treat it with paracetamol and it would go away for a while before returning.
Skip ahead three months of the same cycle and the symptoms began to get worse. She began to feel numbness, tingling and burning sensations across her left arm and shoulder blade. This warranted her to visit A&E, or ER depending on where you're from, and they sent her away with some painkillers and an appointment for an MRI scan for October. During that time, the pain spread to her other shoulder.
She had her scan, the results came back, but nothing was detected other than Bursitis (inflammation) and so she prescribed more painkillers and physiotherapy, but the first session wasn't due until Christmas Eve, so she waited once more. Nearing the end of October, one of her friends noticed something bizarre, one of her eyes was dilated constantly, as if she was in a dark room. It still responded to light, but it wasn't normal. As you can imagine, this was rather frightening, with everything going on and with Google no further away than her phone, something scary like brain damage wasn't too improbable anymore. She immediately contacted her GP and got referred to see a specialist at the start of December.
November came, and about half way through, she began to feel numb from her abdomen to her toes. Bizarre sensations occurred in different temperatures or where was touched and her shoulder pain became excruciating. It began to affect her ability to walk, until, by the end of November, it had deteriorated so much so that she had could not take few steps without needing support. She was rushed to hospital, she had an MRI scan on her head and a CT scan of her whole body. They found something.
She was told that there may be two tumors in her spine and one in her brain, but this was revised down after more information came to light. The brain tumor was a false alarm, but she was also diagnosed with Ewing's Sarcoma in her spine and skull, a vicious form of bone cancer with which you have a higher chance of surviving the younger you are, and when I say young, I mean around twelve young.
It was then that she was immediately transferred to King's College Hospital, one of the best hospitals in the country to have treatment. An operation on her spine removed quite large chunks from the affected vertebrae which affected her ability to walk. The nerve damage was so much so that she had to learn how to walk again, how to balance herself.
But the story doesn't end there. At the start of January, she started her first round of Chemotherapy of fourteen. She had more scans and they revealed that the cancer had not spread to any other part of her body and the tumor was responding to chemo, which was very good news. However, the tumor was also surrounding her heart, which left unchecked could kill her. So she underwent surgery again, which would remove even more bone, in the hope to remove all cancerous cells from her body. It was a two stage surgery, where they essentially would go in through her back and unhook it, then go in again through her torso and remove it. It was scary as the side affects to this surgery are severe, as in she could be permanently paralyzed by it. But the surgery was a total success, the doctors report that the tumor is gone and hopefully gone for good.
I guess the moral of this story is to nag your health service if you're having issues, especially if you live in the UK like us. The NHS wants to get people in and out as fast as possible. It took her losing her ability to walk before they showed any sense of urgency, a similar thing is happening to a friend of mine who is even younger than her and is being given ridiculously far away dates and appointments.