The appointment came through for the 1st of March 2026. A Sunday. Five o'clock in the afternoon.
I play football on Sunday evenings at half past six, which meant my primary concern — and I say this with full awareness of how it sounds in hindsight — was whether the ultrasound might run late and affect my game. Several people assured me that Sunday appointments tend to run on time and that ultrasounds don't take long. I let the lads know I might be a few minutes late, and headed to Scunthorpe Hospital.
I arrived at quarter to five. Within two minutes I was seen, lying on a table with cold gel across my abdomen while a sonographer moved a probe across the lump for no more than two or three minutes. Quick, clinical, unremarkable.
Except it didn't feel unremarkable. I don't know exactly what triggered it — something in the way they looked at the screen, or simply an instinct I couldn't quite explain — but I left with a quiet, uncomfortable feeling that this wasn't going to be straightforward. I couldn't have told you why. I just knew.
I went to football anyway.
On getting home I checked my NHS app. The results were already there. I can't pretend I understood everything the report said, but yellow warning flags appeared throughout, and the language was not the language of a routine, benign finding. I did what any reasonably anxious person with access to the internet might do in that situation — I downloaded the report and put it into an AI tool to help me make sense of it.
The summary was not particularly reassuring. The lump had significant blood flow running through it, which is not consistent with a simple benign cyst and raised the possibility of something called a sarcoma. Further investigation would be needed to determine exactly what it was.
I messaged my friend Dr Aung — my GP at Winterton Medical Practice and, as it happens, someone I'd play football with on those same Sunday evenings — and asked for his thoughts. He said he'd look into it straight away. He was as good as his word.
From there things moved, though not always in a straight line. I was referred to a specialist sarcoma clinic in Sheffield for a biopsy. Sarcomas, I was told, are specific enough that they require specialist assessment — they can be benign or malignant, but either way the expertise sits in dedicated centres. At this stage, regardless of what the biopsy showed, the expectation was relatively simple: a surgical procedure to remove the lump. It was close to the surface, easy to access. This would likely be straightforward.
The biopsy itself went to plan. But once again, lying there during the procedure, I had a feeling. Little comments, small reactions, nothing I could put my finger on. I walked out and said to Lucy: "I'm not sure they were entirely happy with what they found." She told me I was overthinking it. I wasn't convinced.
The biopsy results would go to an MDT — a Multi-Disciplinary Team — who met on Wednesdays to review cases and decide on next steps. The first time around I heard back within a week. The second time, nothing. I chased it up and was told the case had apparently been sent to plastic surgery — which felt to me like confirmation they'd found a sarcoma and were planning to remove it. A week later, chasing again, the picture shifted entirely. It wasn't a sarcoma. The biopsy had shown melanoma.
I pieced together, from the fragments I could gather, that the plastic surgeon had likely declined the referral on the basis that this wasn't their territory — melanoma sat elsewhere in the pathway — and the case had been bounced back. Dr Aung had now received a referral instructing him to pass things on to dermatology. I was frustrated. The lump clearly needed to come out. Dermatology felt like a sideways step.
After a conversation with Dr Aung, who explained that dermatology was the only pathway available to him as a GP, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I booked a private appointment at The Spire in Hull. Two hundred pounds. Less than ten minutes with the consultant.
She was blunt, direct, and exactly what I needed. You don't need dermatology, she told me. You need surgery. You need that removed now. I walked out feeling like I'd perhaps wasted my money — but the follow-up from that appointment was swift and effective. Within days things were moving. A referral back into the NHS surgical pathway. A consultation booked. Progress, finally.
What nobody yet knew — what couldn't be known without further investigation — was whether the lump was the primary cancer or whether it had spread from somewhere else. To answer that question I was referred for a PET-CT scan, which would inject radioactive glucose into my bloodstream and illuminate any cancerous cells anywhere in the body. An MRI would follow, to give a clearer picture of the shape and position of anything that showed up.
I told myself not to worry. I told myself it was probably just the one lump.
But somewhere underneath all of that, a quieter voice was already asking harder questions.
