False Evidence Appearing Real: The Fear Of The Unknown

Hello again all. I’ve been absent for a little too long. Mind you, I’ve been absent in my head as well.

I had the appointment with the bone/tissue tumour people on Wednesday and my consultant is lovely. She told me some quite bad news – the tumour that they were once 90% certain was benign, they are now 75% certain is malignant, and she was quite abrupt telling me this but she has since redeemed herself.

I had an open biopsy yesterday. Went under general anaesthetic, they cut my leg open, took some tumourous bone out and some healthy bone and have sent both samples off to histology. I should get the results in 10 days or so. Apparently, I will feel a ‘bit out of sorts’ until I get the results according to the nurse specialist. What a bloody understatement.

I feel shit. I keep bursting into tears and simultaneously biting everyone’s head off. I am neurotic and paranoid that the boyfriend will leave me because he won’t want the hassle. I want to run away from all of this, until it was pointed out to me that what I would be running from I would actually be running away on (i.e. my leg). I’m not sure how you cope and deal with the bleak, uncertain 10 days of waiting to be told whether you have a sarcoma or not. It’s difficult and there is no rule book. I keep saying I can’t do it, and yet everyone tells me I either can or I have no option or I’ll learn. I’m sure they’re all right, I just can’t quite get it sorted in my own head.

On Wednesday after the hospital appointment I got dropped back at school but instead I crossed the road and went into Asda where I bought blades and tablets. I sat in the toilets making cuts on my leg and crying over a pack of co-codamol and a bottle of water. I only didn’t do anything worse because my Mum sent me a text asking if I was OK, whereupon I realised that I should be back at work and not conducting such silliness.

On Thursday I left work at lunchtime after being told to go home because I was dangerous. I couldn’t concentrate or stop crying and was about to mix 2 chemicals together for a lesson that would have killed the entire class if heated. Before I left I cut my leg again and then went home. My Mum realised what I had done and took me to A&E where a lovely doctor sutured me up but insisted on getting the crisis team out who told me that they shouldn’t be seeing me as they don’t accept referrals from people with BPD. Mind you, Newcastle A&E aren’t especially effective at dealing with self-harm/depression/suicide.

Now, I feel stupid. I’m getting myself worked up about something that still has a 1 in 4 chance of being nothing. And 1 in 4 odds have worked for me before (1 in 4 people having a mental health problem).

I just feel neurotic, but then for once in my life I think I am entitled to be.

Ruth

Too Busy For My Own Liking

Sorry that the updates for this blog are getting further and further apart. This is the curse of not having the internet at home and although I have been issued with a laptop at work I am still not sure what sites I can an cannot access via it. Also I don’t think updating my blog with all it’s secrets about me at work would be a very good idea.

On the whole I am loving my job. It is nice to have something to do. At first it was hard and I felt as if I was being ganged up on a bit by the rest of the technicians but I seem now to have proved myself and proved that I can do this job. I do seem to keep having all the extra crap (laminating, colour printing, rearranging computer resources etc) dumped on me which I am sure is outside the remit of a school science lab technician but I keep doing it to please everyone else, even if this does measn that I’m still cutting, glueing and printing well into the early hours of the morning.

I am enjoying it so much that I have applied to complete a Post Graduate Certificate in Education (PGCE) for Secondary level general science starting in September at the Institute of Education and Goldsmiths College, both in London. I’m not sure if I really want to live back at home but Newcastle doesn’t have any vacancies anymore as I have left it really late to apply, and it is only a year course so I’m sure that I’ll manage.

I’m not sure if I should be making any plans for September yet. I got my plaster cast off on Tuesday which is lovely because as the weather now turns warmer I am not stuck with a fibreglass heat enduring thing round my leg. However, now that the cast is off and the foot appears to be healing, even if the orthopaedic surgeon did have a bit of a go at me over the fact that the scar wasn’t as neat as he thought it should be (not my fault – for once I couldn’t pick and stratch and interfere with it as it was in a cast) we have to turn to the more pressing nature of the fact that the tumour is still in my tibia. They took another x-ray on Tuesday and compared it with the pre-op and post-op x-rays and with the MRI scan I had back in February. The tumour has grown, quite significantly and they are now concerned about it.

A few months ago they told me that they were 90% certain that it was benign, although as the boyfriend said, that always left a 1 in 10 chance. They did a biopsy which showed an abnormality so they did another one which proved inconclusive, because of this they decided to watch and wait and treat the injury first. Now it has grown quite significantly they are worried that it is quite aggressive.

They even mentioned the C word and were talking about possible treatment options. These range from amputation, through to removed the tumour and completing a bone graft or inserting a metal rod to support the bone (the tumour is now occupying about 35% of the bone space in my tibia), through to drug treatment if it does turn out to be malignant, through to watching and waiting. I’m not good at coping with the unknown and this is one of the biggest unknowns I have ever had to face.

I have an appointment with the North of England Bone and Soft Tissue Tumour Service people on Wednesday. There I will see a nurse specialist and another orthopaedic surgeon to see what is the best way to progress. I will have some more tests, including a bone scan and be booked in for another biopsy, possibly an open biopsy, and undergo another MRI scan. As the boyfriend said earlier in the week, it never rains but it pours!

Otherwise things are OK. I have been preoccupied and nearly on the verge of tears with the above and on Wednesday morning I nearly didn’t go into work, but I did eventually, but then went to A&E straight afterwards after cutting myself. The doctor who treated me tried to be kind and sympathetic but acknowledged it was a stressful and worrying time for me and if I needed to cut then I should get angry with myself for doing it. She gave me the basic talk on harm minimisation and then steri-stripped me up, stuck some dermabond on top and let me go. She did ask if I wanted to see the Deliberate Self Harm Team but I said there wasn’t any point and she agreed saying that they probably wouldn’t see me as there is a clear stressor for the event. I also saw C (my psychiatrist) on Friday who said she was glad that I was panicking because if I was calm then she would have been worried and that it is a great improvement on a few months ago that I actually care about my life and my future.

It’s been glorious weather and I actually braved Newcastle city centre in a t-shirt and knee length skirt yesterday. I got some odd looks and some stares but I don’t care anymore. I also went for a mooch round Leazes Park where I bumped into one of my named nurses from when I was on the section and her little girl who were feeding ducks. I also got told that I was ‘well cool’ by a group of wannabe emos who were sitting and smoking. One of them made me sad as she stared at my scars and told me that she was ‘well impressed with them’, as I looked at her she had faint lines all over her arms. I really wish self-harm wasn’t seen as the cool thing to do, it makes me angry and sad and scared that people are doing it to fit in. Of course it is a topic that makes me agry and sad and scared anyway, but the idea of teenagers damaging their body permanently just to fit into a social circle distresses me somewhat.

Ruth