Everybody’s free to wear sunscreen

For me my life didn’t change at 4pm on an idle Tuesday, it was 7pm on an idle Thursday just before Christmas 2016……

I’m the perfect example of a text book hypochondriac, one that immediately think dizziness means a brain tumour, a cough means lung cancer, and blood in the stools means Bowel cancer. However years of CBT has meant that I’ve learnt to rationalise every ailment – including the last year of a change in bowel habbits that I put down to too much wine, a new job and stress of trying to be that full time working ‘super mum’.

If only for once someone believed me earlier that I wasn’t ‘crying wolf’ – when in my normal nervous GP ‘question time’ I tell the doctor I think I have bowel cancer – I’m actually laughed at – not once but 3 times over the course of 6 months! Despite being reassured on numerous occasions that I must have IBS, hemmaroids or worse case colitis, my blood tests and stool sample came back ‘normal’ so everything must be fine! 

And yet I was still losing weight, passing blood, going what felt like 100 times per day and feeling shattered. I knew there was something wrong with me, a sixth sense if you will, because for the first time I was afraid – very afraid about taking this further. 

Fed up with waiting for a referral, Im lucky I was able to take myself off privately to see a colonoscopist. Being so scared however, I made sure I went skiing, had finnished the school term and bumped 3 appointments just because something was telling me this might change everything. 

I was blind sided at 7pm on Thursday 15th December 2016, when having refused the sedative and having researched what cancerous tumours would appear like in a colonoscopy (total hypochondriac geek alert!), I stared my ugly 5.5cm cancerous, ulcerated tumour in the face and everything went silent…..