Half tumour, half woman
Saturday 14th February 2009
My daughter, Katie, popped her head round the living room door and groaned.
'You're doing sit-ups again?' she grumbled.
'No,' I puffed. 'I just can't decide whether to sit up or lie down.'
'Ha ha!' she said sarcastically.
I don't know what she was moaning about. I was the one sweating buckets as I panted my
way through another exercise video.
Suddenly, I had an idea.
'Want to see Alien?' I wheezed, as I carried on crunching.
'No!' she protested.
'Too bad,' I said. 'Here he comes.'
Pulling myself up for sit-up number 30, I lifted up my T-shirt. As my stomach tightened, a tennis ball-shaped lump bulged out of the front of my belly.
'Say hello to Alien,' I giggled.
'Gross!' Katie, then 17, said, covering her eyes.
Alien was my party trick. Well, I say that, but I didn't actually flash him at parties. Too nasty! I saved him for freaking out Katie, her brother, Brian, 24, and the kids' stepdad, Byron, 50. Alien, a weird-shaped mound of fat, popped out every time I crunched my stomach. The kids had nicknamed him a few years back. You might think it strange to give
a name to a lump of fat, but if I didn't laugh at my figure, I'd have cried. I weighed 18st and carried most of the weight around my waist. I was the classic apple shape.
Before I had the children, I was a size 14, weighing 10st 10lb. But after giving birth to Katie, my weight had rocketed to 16st and I was lucky to squeeze into a size 20. But I wasn't complaining about the weight gain, I was complaining about the lack of weight loss. I worked hard to fight the flab. There wasn't an exercise video I hadn't bought, and hardly a day went by when I didn't do sit-ups. But my waist just kept expanding. I wasn't overeating either so, frustrated, I visited my GP for the umpteenth time.
'You're obese,' he told me. 'You need to try harder to lose the weight.'
'I'm trying,' I sighed.
It was clear he didn't believe me. I felt so ashamed, I decided not to point out Alien or that my tummy felt hard in places. Over the years, it was always the same story. I tried every diet there was. I joined exercise classes, went swimming. Still, my belly grew. But soon, dieting was the last thing on my mind. In November 2005, Byron fell at home and was admitted to hospital. He contracted the MRSA bug and, a month later, he died. My husband of 20 years was just 58 years old. Katie had moved from our home in California to Redmond, Oregon. I soon got lonely so, two years after Byron died, I moved to Redmond
as well. By then, I weighed 25st.
Determined to keep active, I still did workouts in my living room, touching my toes and stretching my arms, but as the weeks passed, I was breathless just walking a few yards.
Then, in March this year, I woke up one morning feeling ill. Katie loitered at the bathroom door as I heaved into the loo.
'Must be a bug,' I sighed.
But boy, was it a bad one. By that afternoon, I was still being sick and my whole body was aching.
'Right, that's it,' Katie decided. 'Either you let me take you to the hospital or I'm calling an ambulance.'
'OK,' I agreed.
Katie rushed me to St Charles Medical Centre, in Redmond, and I was seen by a doctor immediately. He couldn't be sure what was wrong, so he decided I needed exploratory surgery. I was whisked into theatre.
'I'll be right here,' Katie called, as I disappeared through the doors.
It all happened so fast, there wasn't time to be scared. Everything went black, and the next thing I knew, a voice was pulling me up out of the fog.
'Mum, can you hear me?'
'Mmmm,' I groaned, slowly opening my eyes.
Katie and Brian were standing over my hospital bed.
'You've been out of it for three days,'
Katie said.
'Why?' I mumbled, feeling groggy.
'Your appendix had burst, so the surgeon removed it,' she explained. 'But it wasn't the only thing they removed.'
'What do you mean?' I frowned.
'They found a tumour,' she blurted.
Not just any old tumour either.
It was a massive, cancerous tumour that had wrapped itself round my waistline, masquerading as fat. It was a rare, slow-growing kind, called a liposcarcoma.
'It could have been growing for up to 20 years,' Katie added.
That's why I'd never lost weight. It wasn't fat, it was a tumour! But that was only half the story. As I marvelled about all those wasted years of sit-ups and diets, my doctor prepared to tell me the rest. I was alone when he came to my hospital bedside.
'You had two tumours,' he said.
The first one, weighing three- and-a-half stone and the size of a basketball, had been removed. But the second one was still inside me. It was bigger, and was growing close to my vital organs.
'You have two choices,' the doctor explained. 'You can have surgery to remove the tumour, but we can only give you a 20 per cent chance of survival.'
I tried to let his words sink in.
'Or…?' I said eventually.
'Or you can go home and enjoy the couple of months you have left with your family.'
The tumour was so big, my stomach would probably explode. I broke down and cried.
There was no choice. Not really. I couldn't give up and wait to die. At 58, I had so much more life to live.
'Let's do the op,' I told him.
The children were devastated. Katie wanted to know why doctors hadn't picked up on the tumours before, but I couldn't stew over that now. I was transferred to the Oregon Health and Sciences University, in Portland, and five days later, I was prepared for surgery. This time, I was completely terrified. The odds told me I wasn't going to make it, but I put on a brave face for the kids.
'Now listen,' I told them before I was wheeled away. 'I have no will, but I leave everything to you.'
'Don't say that,' Brian protested.
'I want to be cremated,' I went on. 'You two can scatter my ashes somewhere nice.'
'You're going to be OK,' Katie wept.
But as I kissed them goodbye and watched their tear-stained faces disappear, I wasn't so confident. The operation took 13 hours.The doctors sliced away a six-and- a-half-stone tumour, the biggest they'd ever come across. It was so big, they had to remove both my kidneys to get it out and, because one kidney was damaged, they only replaced one. But I couldn't care less. I survived. At the beginning of June, three weeks after that operation, I was discharged from hospital. Now, eight months on, I'm thankful to be alive. I'm on a lot of medication and doctors have warned me the tumour will come back, but it's slow-growing, so it may never affect me. In all, they removed 10st of tumours from my belly. I was half woman, half tumour I can laugh about it now because I weigh 14st, and I didn't have to do one sit-up to achieve it!