Teen Cancer Stories – United Kingdom

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/you/article-2225842/Real-lives-Teenage-cancer.html

Megan London, 14, lives in Melton Mowbray, LeicestershireI went to hospital to have some blood tests because an insect bite on my leg didn’t seem to be healing. Within a few hours they’d diagnosed leukemia. I started chemotherapy the next day…it was more than four weeks before I saw my own bedroom again.

It was such a shock, and out of nowhere, so it took a while to process. What I did know was that it was very frightening: I saw my dad cry, and that’s scary when you’re a child. At one point I asked if I was going to die and the doctor said I had an 88 per cent chance of being fine, which was kind of reassuring, I suppose.

One of the bad things about hospital was feeling cut off from my friends. I didn’t want to start talking to people on Facebook because it seemed a strange way to tell them I had cancer. Also, I didn’t want it to be the first thing people thought of when they thought of me.(cont. on back)

“I felt cut off from my friends. I didn’t want to start talking to them on Facebook – it seemed a strange way to tell them I had cancer”

Megan London, 14, lives in Melton Mowbray, Leicestershire

The worst thing was losing my hair. I love my hair – I’d always had it long and I like styling it, making it different. Losing it was horrible. So was the chemotherapy, which made me feel more tired than I thought was possible – so tired that I had to be pushed round in a wheelchair, which was so weird and meant that people stared at me all the time.

A year on from the diagnosis I’m stable and back at school. Health-wise I’m pretty good, although I have had pancreatitis twice which is incredibly painful. I’m also on steroids that make me diabetic, and another drug I’m on affects my feet so I can’t walk properly. One thing you don’t realize before you have cancer is how the treatments affect other parts of your body – so a lot of the time that’s what you’re dealing with, rather than the cancer directly.

I yearn to be a normal 14-year-old again. I want to be able to do PE, to run around and to hang out with my friends. Ordinary stuff – I never imagined how much I’d miss it.

Ethan Sellwood,12, lives in SouthamptonIt started last summer, when my leg gave way a couple of times. It hurt, especially in the mornings. The doctor said it was soft-tissue damage but a voice inside me said something’s really not right.

And it wasn’t: I had bone cancer. It’s rare: only 60 children in the UK get it each year. And there were definitely times when I thought, why me?

I had chemotherapy for ten weeks, and then an operation during which the bone in my left femur was removed and replaced with metal. Not many years ago, I’d have had to have my leg amputated: that’s quite a sobering thought.

The first time I tried to stand up afterwards I couldn’t feel my leg at all. I thought I was going to fall over. I still can’t walk properly on it; I use crutches around the house and a wheelchair when I’m out.

“I hope I can just get back to normal. I want to do the things I used to love, such as scooting”

Ethan Sellwood,12, lives in SouthamptonI can’t go to school yet, and spend a lot of my time doing physio because that’s what’s going to help me use my leg properly. Then I hope I can just get back to normal, be a normal kid again. I want to do the things I used to love, such as scooting – that was one of my favorites.

The main thing cancer does for a kid is make you closer to your family. I’m way closer to my two brothers, Jamie and Alex, who are 22 and 15, than I used to be. They’re here all the time, I see more of them than anyone else apart from my parents. And it’s made me close to Mum and Dad, but I worry about them, about how worried they are themselves and about how it’s affecting their jobs, as well as how sad it makes them feel.

Beckii Handy, 16, lives in Solihull, West Midlands“Something changes in you when you get cancer – you know you can’t be certain about anything again” I had indigestion – and when the doctor pressed my tummy, it

hurt. At the hospital they did some tests and discovered I had a cyst on my ovary. It was almost certainly benign, I was told – I was 15. But I had this feeling that things weren’t right.

All the same, finding out that I had cancer was a massive shock. Also, the doctors weren’t sure whether my tumor was primary or secondary – and if it was secondary, the outlook would be worse. It was too much to take in: even at the hospital, everyone I saw was shocked that it was happening to someone so young.

After a couple of weeks they said my tumor was definitely primary, and I started chemotherapy. I’ll never forget walking into the young people’s cancer unit at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham for the first time: you don’t ever think of teenagers with cancer, but this place was full of them. There were teenagers without hair, teenagers who were crying, teenagers who were just gazing into space. I thought, ‘This isn’t me! This can’t be me.’ But after a while you realize that it’s not so bad all the time – and being with other young people is good, because only other teenagers can understand what you’re going through. You’re having to face things no teenager should have to face: things like, am I going to be around in a few months’ time? And if I do get to be an adult, will I ever be able to have children of my own?

Beckii Handy, 16, lives in Solihull, West MidlandsThe treatment was grueling: I was wired up to an intravenous drip for as long as nine hours. It was on wheels, so I could move around. But sometimes I didn’t want to move around. I just wanted to lie in my bed and stare into space because I didn’t feel up to talking to other people.

But that’s not how it always was. There were days when I chatted to the other patients, watched telly (TV), did my schoolwork (this was my GCSE year, so as well as everything else I was revising for my exams). Sometimes a professional make-up artist would come into the unit to show us how to make ourselves look good, and that took your mind off things. Another service was that they provided us with wigs when our hair fell out. It’s quite a specific thing, designing wigs for teenagers: we want cool hair, hair that’s fun and hair we can play around with. My hair has grown back a bit now, but it’s curly, quite different from the way it used to be. I tend to wear a wig: I’ve got two, one long and one short.

A big part of surviving cancer for me was having a boyfriend. I was already in a relationship when I was diagnosed, and both my boyfriend’s mum and his gran also had cancer. He was always supportive, always there for me. We split up after my treatment (nothing to do with my illness) and I started going out with Tom – and believe me, there’s no greater boon to your self-esteem when you’re going through chemotherapy and have lost your hair than to get a new boyfriend! He calls me ‘beautiful’ every day, and that’s meant the world to me.

It’s a year since I was diagnosed, and I’ve been told I’m clear, though I’ll always have to have check-ups. And whatever the doctors say, something changes in you when you get cancer – you know you can’t be certain about anything again. Going through something like this turns you into an adult overnight.

Tom Marton,14, lives in Beverley, East Yorkshire On New Year’s Day 2013 I’m going to put a message on my Facebook page saying something very rude that means: 2012 was bad. Very, very bad. The worst year of my life; the worst year I can possibly imagine.

The weird thing is that just a few weeks before I was diagnosed, I remember thinking: is this what life is? Is it things carrying on the same way, am I just going to go to school each day, then go to work each day, getting older, and then eventually die? Does anything actually happen?

And then something did. It started as a headache, with slight double vision. The doctor thought it was a migraine. But it didn’t go away, so I had an MRI scan and they told my mum it was a brain tumor (I was too ill to even know what was going on by that stage). Mum and Dad are divorced, so Mum had to phone Dad to tell him. She was so upset, he thought I was dead.

The tumor was in the center of my brain, and it was causing a massive pressure build-up, so the next day I was in surgery for four hours while they tried to drain it. After that there were weeks of chemotherapy, including one stage where I was given high-dose drugs which killed off my immune system. It was all scary stuff.

“People say I’m inspiring and strong – I hate that. I’m no superhero, just a boy who

wants to stay alive.”

Tom Marton,14, lives in Beverley, East Yorkshire And then came the big one – a 14-hour operation to remove the tumor. I knew there were risks but I didn’t want to know too much: my attitude is that it’s best to concentrate on doing what you can to make things go right. I see my illness as an unexpected river I’ve got to cross on my life’s journey. It’s a daunting river and it’s very difficult getting across it, but all I can do is build my bridge, and when things are tough I keep on building it, brick by brick.

Many kids of my age are all into their friends – and my friends have been important. But when something like this happens to you, you realize what family means: my family have been fantastic – my parents, my brother, my half-brother, my stepbrother and sister. When my hair fell out, my brother and my stepbrother both shaved their heads in solidarity: that meant a lot to me.

Two weeks after the surgery I came home, and I’m now going to Leeds each weekday for radiotherapy – it’s a three-hour round trip plus half an hour of radiotherapy. That’s going to carry on for the next six weeks or so, after which we’ll see what they say.

Cancer has messed up my life, there’s no getting round it. People say I’m inspiring and strong – I hate that. I’m no superhero, just a boy who wants to stay alive, doing what the doctors and nurses tell him in the hope of one day getting his life back.

Rachel Belshaw, 17, lives in Staines, MiddlesexI was 12 when I was diagnosed with cancer – on the verge of puberty. There’s never a good age for it, but that’s quite a tough moment: your life is changing a lot anyway, and suddenly you’ve got this other huge thing to deal with as well.

The diagnosis came out of the blue. I’d fallen over ice-skating and hurt my neck. Next morning there was a lump, so we went to casualty and they said it was a blood clot and I’d be fine. But over the next few weeks it got worse. Back at the hospital they took some X-rays and then left my mum and me in a cubicle for ages. Doctor after doctor kept coming in, looking at the X-rays, saying nothing, going out again. Eventually one of them said I would have to be admitted. Mum asked on to which ward, and the doctor said, ‘pediatric oncology’. I hadn’t got a clue what that meant, but from the way my mum’s face fell, I knew it was terrible.“Don’t look it up on the

internet, they said, you’ll only scare yourself. So I didn’t”

Rachel Belshaw, 17, lives in Staines, MiddlesexWithin a few days I was in the Royal Marsden hospital in London, having a biopsy and then starting chemotherapy. For a while they knew it was lymphoma but they didn’t know whether it was Hodgkin’s or non-Hodgkin’s. Don’t look it up on the internet, they said, you’ll only scare yourself. So I didn’t, and then the news came back that it was Hodgkin’s, which is easier to treat, but the bad news was that it was very aggressive.

I had five months of chemotherapy; some weeks my mum and I were going to hospital every day, a 40-minute drive each way, and sometimes we had to be there for 7.30am. I couldn’t go to school because of the risk of getting an infection. My friends came to see me at home but I think a lot of them were scared by it. I was losing my hair and really quite ill, so it was tough for them to handle.

I didn’t find my school helpful. They didn’t help with my work, and when I eventually felt well enough to go in one day, I got told off twice for wearing a hat. It was only when the teacher realized I didn’t have any hair that she stopped shouting at me. They’d never had a pupil with cancer before and they had no idea how to treat me. I’ve left that school now and I’m doing A-levels at college. It’s an odd combination – biology, chemistry, law and business – but I want to become a fundraiser for a medical charity, and I thought they’d be the most useful. I’m clear of cancer now, and I want to give something back to society in return for my life. I don’t want other children to go through what I had to go through.