I think of myself as very fortunate to still be around. So many things could have happened in my story that could have been just a little different and I would have gone undiagnosed.
It all started with a cough that didn't want to go away. I was still staying London when it began and I didn't pay much notice to it. In fact, we went to a club in London and I was not the only one that walked out of there with a cough. There must have been a bad bug doing the rounds.
I was due to go to France the weekend so the cough was particularly annoying since it would mean that my holiday was going to start off sick and I spent allot of time in the hostels where I was staying and on my overnight train journey to Nice from France where I had to stifle my cough.
The cough was basically cleared up by the time I came back from France but a little niggle remained at the back of my thought and I got into a habit of clearing my thought allot with an occasional cough.
After about a month of this not going away I went to the doctor for the first time. I thought this would also be a good time to just highlight a little bump in the back of my neck. I had been told previously that it was a swollen lymph node and that it will sort itself out.
The doctor checked my thought, saw nothing. Very uninterestedly glanced at my neck and told me I was fine and that the irritation would pass and that it was past of a previous viral infection. Content with this I went on my merry way.
The cough didn't go away tho, it got better then worse and better again so after giving it another 2 months I went back to the NHS doctor and it was the same story. He obviously didn't even check my file to see that I had complained about this previously. The doctor was in fact so giggly (male doctor) that I was thinking he was either high or had a crush on me. Again I left and the cough actually went away for a month or so but returned again. By this time I had done a Backpacking trip through Europe in which my stamina was a little lacking and I was going back to South Africa.
When I arrived back I again went to a doctor just to get some antibiotics to get the cough sorted out but I got the same story from the South African doctor. I started my new job, most importantly got on my new medical aid and got on a disability scheme at work.
Two months later I again went in for the Cough. This time I told the doctor that I was really agitated, no one is doing anything about my cough its not going to go away and she referred me to a specialist (so I guess if you want something done...)
The Specialist was a respiratory surgeon and he had me go first for X-rays. I was fairly certain it would be nothing. I didn't smoke, didn't drink more than most outgoing people my age and I was never sick aside from the occasional sniffy nose, I think I had a bad cough a school once to and I stayed home for a week.
The X-Ray revealed the very good news that I didn't have TB. It was also showing "something funny", as the termed it, but I said I probably had it all my life. Just to be safe a sonar was done and then things started getting interesting. The scans showed little from my chest but when the doctor scanned below he had trouble identifying my organs. He kept saying, "this shouldn't be there" or "is this the spleen?".
Meanwhile I asked the doctor if he could not perhaps do something about my fatigue. He said it was probably to do with the infection in my lungs which he did give some antibiotics for that did do the trick and clear up the cough. He sent me to check my iron levels and I guess calcium falls under the same test because I got a rather nervous phone call from the doctor asking me to come back and redo the blood tests because there was an anomaly in my calcium.
I went back and it wasn't a mistake, my calcium was though the roof. I was ordered by the doctor to get myself into the hospital asap. I asked if tomorrow morning would be fine but he said he'd prefer it if I'd be there inside the hour. He said that it pointed to either TB or Cancer and that with the levels as high as they where I could have heart failure at any time. I walked into my bosses office told him I have to go to the hospital because I possibly have cancer and left for the hospital.
The next week was a series of tests, everything from bone marrow (which I wont wish on my worse enemy) to some rather embarrassing tests involving my kidneys and they finally got the diagnosis they wanted with a biopsy. I was scheduled for surgery the next day but they didn't need to go that far since the biopsy was conclusive. It was Hodgkin's lymphoma. Which I was told is a good cancer to have if you have to have cancer.
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