… and watch the health-care professionals assume there can’t be much wrong with you…

I’ve been blessed with a complexion & constitution that I believe would have been called “sanguine” in medieval times. Pictures of me as a toddler, long ago, show an apple-cheeked little girl, glowing with apparent health, galloping around in the sparkling-clean Dartmoor air. I still have rosy cheeks most of the time. This can sometimes be misleading…

For many years, I went to & from my GP’s surgery complaining of pain in my right hip. But because of the rosy cheeks and my stubborn refusal to give into that pain, it was generally assumed that a) it couldn’t be that bad, and b) it probably wasn’t actually my hip causing problems, but was “referred” pain from my back, due to my having had 5 babies including twins, and my stomach muscles being shot to pieces by the inevitable stretching. My poor old GP referred me for X-rays and physiotherapy a number of times; the physios always got in first, prescribed lots of core-muscle exercises, and cancelled the X-ray request, for the reason given above. So when at last the X-ray department had a next-day cancellation and got in first, all they could say was, “Oh, dear…” as my utterly-crumbled hip joint was revealed. (“We have people in wheelchairs with less damage than you,” one medic confided.) I was fast-tracked for for an early total hip replacement & haven’t looked back since.

There have been other examples, but most notably, I’ve been to our surgery a number of times over the last few years, complaining of “blood in the pan,” just as the TV adverts tell us to do. Not a lot, and not very frequent, though it did ramp up a bit last summer following a stomach upset. Once again, my looking the very picture of somewhat-plump glowing health misled the professionals; I was told I had rectal tears (forgive me if TMI, but this is important) or more probably internal piles; after all, I’d pushed 4 babies out. (One, of course, had to be different and exited via the sunroof, as they say.) So I didn’t stress about it, and didn’t want to keep bothering our overstretched health services with such a minor problem. But something nagged away at me and after an intensifying of the symptoms last summer, I went back to our new young GP, who was somewhat more alert and referred me for a colonoscopy.

Sadly, it turned out not to be piles. A nasty-looking growth was found within seconds. Luckily it was still quite small and contained within the bowel walls; it was removed with remarkable speed, within a couple of weeks, despite the newspapers braying about NHS waiting lists and inefficiencies. I’ve been sporting a natty loop ileostomy this winter, to allow my colon to rest, and can’t sing the praises of the surgeons and the wonderful stoma nurses enough.

It was also recommended that I have a short course of “adjuvant” or mopping-up chemotherapy to make sure that no mischievous cells had escaped, so I signed up for that. And then it emerged that I was one of the few people who have poor tolerance for this treatment due to a faulty copy of an “allele” on the relevant gene. But we persevered on a reduced dose, although I ended up in hospital twice, and I’m now at the end of that process & recovering to the point where hopefully they can reverse the ileostomy and put me back together again soon. I can’t wait to resume my normal diet and get back to rescuing, re-purposing & renovating stuff, running my stall and enjoying all the summer festivities again, and I will forever be massively grateful that I’m lucky enough to be able to do so.

So, my messages to you are:

• support our wonderful NHS and fight tooth & nail to keep it. And please,
• NEVER IGNORE BLOOD IN THE PAN. Always get it checked out. It probably IS just piles, but not always, and there’s so much that can be done now if it isn’t.
• To healthcare professionals, PLEASE don’t allow pink cheeks, no loss of weight and a reluctance to give in to persuade you that there can’t be anything much wrong with your patient. Some of us are just born that way…