I have recently been diagnosed with synovial sarcoma. Obviously from the fact that I'm blogging about it here, it's a cancer - although I think it sounds more like a pokemon.
This is what it looked like
It seems incredible that something so small and insignificant can be potentially life threatening, doesn't it?
It started out just as a sore point in my hand, if I squeezed something or jolted my hand at all it hurt. There was nothing to see, but the pain just didn't get better. It must have been months before I even thought to mention it to a doctor. They told me to take ibuprofen and try and rest it, but that didn't help either. After another year or so I asked to be referred to the hospital, and that's where all the fun started.
The hospital wasn't sure what it was either, they thought ganglion originally and then after I'd had ultrasound and mri scans they thought it was probably a schwanomma (another pokemon but a benign one!) - eventually I had surgery to remove the tumour and the histology showed that it was a grade 2 synovial sarcoma. That got me referred to the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London.
That's where we are now. I've got to have a bigger operation as the follow up mri has shown residual cancer in and around the scar tissue - that's planned for May 9th so not long now. I had a CT scan a week ago to see if there was any sign of the cancer having spread to my lungs, I'm not sure when I'll hear the results of that but I guess it will be at the next review after the surgery when I'm expecting to get referred for radiotherapy.
I'm still getting used to what all this means, I hope it will make more sense when I know what the results of the CT scan were. It doesn't help that my cancer seems to be really rare so there aren't lots of success stories to read to bolster the mood - hopefully this will turn into one of my own.
