Hey there. Hello. Good morning. Or afternoon, evening, or indeed whatever time you choose to read this. Glad you could make it.
I might as well introduce myself while you're continuing with this little book. My name is David Crews, 17, from Lichfield. I was diagnosed with a Stage 4 Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma nearly two years ago now... wow, I hadn't realised it was so long ago. Time flies when you're having fun(!).
This will be a sort-of story of my time through the decline, diagnosis, treatments and recovery, for your reading pleasure. There are really two reasons I'm writing this. One of them is very much at the forefront; I want to help other people who have unfortunately ended up going through a similar ordeal. The second reason is really to try to once-and-for-all ground myself firmly to reality and finally accept that I haven't simply smoked something illegal and had a very strange dream about all of this.
Anyway, I'd better start actually telling you what happened, hadn't I? Well, make sure you're comfy. Get a snack now, if you want. Check your schedule and make sure you're free to read for the next however long you need. Ready? OK, here we go...
Chapter One.
I'd like to say it started on a dark and stormy night, but let's be honest here – it didn't.
Or it may have done. I'm not sure when it started. It's not really a thing you can pin down and say “Yes, the entire thing started at precisely this time because of that.”
What I do know it started with, was a cold.
Let me explain. It was sometime in February 2010, I fancy around the 20th or thereabouts. I had agreed to take a friend from school to a Toby Carvery for a meal (Naming no names, Chris!). When we went to pick him up, his mother presented him to us (me and my mum) with a raging cold, nose like Niagara Falls and a sneeze that would make the apocalypse sound like a party popper.
We still took him to the restaurant, because we figured that 'Hey, it's only a cold! What's the worst that could happen?' As expected, we both went down with a cold. As expected, mum got better. Not as expected, I didn't quite recover. I remained quite lethargic, even though the Niagara nose and the apocalyptic sneeze had vanished. Even now, two and a half years later, I can get unusually tired sometimes. But that's neither here nor there.
So, the months passed, and I still wasn't quite right. It wasn't that anything was particularly wrong, it just wasn't right. The whole swine flu scare came and went. I caught swine flu in the last few days of the school year, and missed the last day of school (I'll say now that scare was complete hype, barely any worse than a cold) . Then something else started going wrong.
My left shoulder started aching. And I don't mean a twinge, I mean a constant ache that feels like your bones are covered in sandpaper. We put it down to bad sleeping posture at first, so we got a memory foam pillow. That seemed to work for the moment, so we forgot about it.
After about two weeks, the pain returned.
We got a memory foam mattress topper to help, and I got advice on sleeping positions. That worked for about two weeks again. We started rubbing Ibuprofen gel into the shoulder before going to bed. That worked for about three weeks. By that time, we were stumped as to what was going on.
Around August time, I started having regular blood tests to try and find the cause of the constant, underlying lethargy. They did about five or six over the coming months
About this time, a memory stuck very firmly in my head. It was sometime that September or October, I think. By this time, the pain in my shoulder was bad enough to get me off doing PE in school. I was standing in the little watching area along the length of the school astroturf. Another person who was also not doing PE that week, Liam, asked me why I was off. I told him I had shoulder pains. He laughed and said “Oh come on, that's not a real injury!” It was all in good humour, I laughed as well. But in retrospect, the pain was probably caused by the swelling lymph nodes behind my collarbone pressing against one of the nerves leading from my left arm. So, Liam, if ever you read this... Not a real injury, my foot!
So, on rolled November. In the later weeks of that month, the final straw came.
A rash started to form on the bottom of my throat, in the middle 'V' bit of my collarbone. At first we put it down to the tie rubbing. Then it got worse and developed into a small lump. We went to our local hospital, who said “It's an allergic reaction, just take some antihistamine.”
One particular warning sign, and I remember thinking it at the time, was that particular way the doctor had said “...Ooh!” when we showed him the lump. I've never put it out of my mind. And this is a word of advice to all who read this. If a doctor makes that specific “...Ooh!” sound, and you'll know it when you hear it, you should be very concerned indeed.
So we went away and I took some of the capsules they gave me. They did precisely zilch.
Within two days, the lump had almost doubled in size, and was incredibly sore to the touch. We went back to the GP, and they went “...Ooh!” at it. When that didn't work, they referred me to Stafford Hospital.
I have three memories of that day. First, it was Tuesday 1st December 2009, I have never forgotten that date. Second, That of sheer, unadulterated fear and uncertainty, being told we were to go to this hospital place, and you may need an overnight bag.
The other was on the way to the hospital, and seeing the guys and girls from my school being kicked out for another day. I recognized my friend Chris (yes, the same one who gave me that fateful cold ten months previously) casually walking over to the train station. That was the one and only time I have ever wanted to be someone else that badly, I just felt so lost in this strange world of pains and needles and lumps and general medical unpleasantness, whereas he knew that Chris, on the other side of the car door, would go home, have a snack, be pestered about homework and probably go on a few dozen computer games before bedtime.
I know it doesn't seem much to envy looking back now, but it was something.
