No Mans Land

Hi all,

I’m Ellie, I’m 30 with a wonderful, amazing husband and two incredible little girls. I have/had cervical cancer. I was intially treated for it in Jan 2018 with a radical hysterectomy. It was really positive at the time, there was no cancer in my lymphnodes or in any of the tissue they removed aside from the tumor on my cervix. I was told I didn’t require any further treatment but I didn’t even make it to the 3 month follow-up before I was e-mailing in with questions about funny pains in my pelvis. I was invited in and examined, sent for an MRI and on my 3 month followup I was told the MRI had discovered 3cm of suspicious tissue.  I was sent for a PET scan which showed that the tissue was cancerous, and not only was it in my pelvis, it was also on my stomach. I will never forget being told the prognosis was “poor” by a surgical fellow who was my age with a wife and two young children. He couldn’t get through it without crying, because it so easily could have been his wife in my place. I eventually met with my oncologist who told me in June last year that I had 5 years left, but that we would do palliative chemotherapy and radiotherapy to try to reduce and control the cancer.

Because the cancer was leaning on my right ureter I had to have a uretic stent put in before I could start chemo. I started chemo in early July last year and then we had to stop treatment because I developed a fistula between my bowel and the top of my vagina so I had to have a colostomy in order to continue treatment. I had that in the August of last year and chemo resumed in September. I completed seven rounds on chemo, the last cycle I completed in a local hospice because I had a reaction to the chemo.

I finished chemo in January of this year and was sent for a CT scan which showed that the chemo had worked way better than we ever could have imagined. Both the tumors had gone. Because of this I was able to have the uretic stent removed because it was causing me an awful lot of pain and discomfort. I then developed sepsis from the picc line I had and spent two weeks in hospital on IV antibiotics which pushed out my radiotherapy beginning by a week. I went on to complete 25 sessions of radiotherapy which made me feel sick and so fatigued it was unreal. 

I’ve finished all my treatment now, and the hospitals line is that it will return at some point.  But for now, I have no idea how to live. I don’t know what to do, I have another scan coming up but honestly I don’t know what to do without the hospital or the hospice. I have been so involved with them for so long and now they are just gone and it’s weird. It’s like I am so unbelievably grateful for the extra time but I’m so paralysed by fear I have no idea how to enjoy it. I feel like I’m in no mans land wondering when the next shell is going to come and knock me over.

I hope that all makes some sense, it’s been bubbling away inside me I need to get it out. Thanks for reading x