CANCER SURVIVOR: "I would have preferred to be in the library than attached to tubes in a hospital bed."
The C word, Cancer, nobody likes to hear it. It’s a word that we wish didn't exist, however thousands of people each year are diagnosed with it.
On average, 35 people in the UK are diagnosed each year with Acute Promyelocytic Leukaemia.
English undergraduate, Emma Newton was one of the 35.
Acute Promyelocytic Leukaemia, is a cancer of the blood, effecting the white blood cells, which are a really important part of our immune system that fights infection.
It was just half way through the twenty year olds’ second year at Sheffield Hallam University when she remembers suddenly not feeling well. “I kept picking up little bugs and things and felt like rubbish,” she says. Feeling tired, run down and having constant headaches, Emma initially thought she had just got a delayed freshers’ flu.
After a month of feeling really unwell, a whole other problems then hit Emma. She began finding bruises all over her body that she couldn’t explain where they had come from and got blood blisters in her mouth.
“At the time, I didn’t really think huge amounts of the blood blisters, and just thought everyone got them, but the bruises I could only think I may have fallen over on a night out,” she said.
Emma returned home one weekend, hoping for some tlc from her parents, due to feeling so ill. When she showed them the bruises all over her body, Emma’s Mum, Joan, who is a specialist biomedical scientist, knew that something wasn’t quite right.
Taking a quick trip to the doctors, Emma was given a check-up. But during her appointment, she began to vomit blood. It was at this point that she was rushed straight to hospital.
For five days, Emma underwent a series of blood tests and other examinations, in aim to rule out as much as possible. After taking a bone marrow test from Emma, it was then that they found the leukaemia. Emma couldn't believe it:
“I thought the doctor was going to say ‘only joking’, after he told me, but he didn’t."
Initially she says she didn’t know how to feel, but just thought: “I am going to die, I am going to die.”
One day after being diagnosed with Cancer and Emma was already in a different hospital, tied up in tubes, beginning chemo.
Emma, before she was diagnosed with Cancer
Emma undergoing chemotherapy
Emma, before she was diagnosed with Cancer
Dropping out of uni to fight for her life against the Cancer, Emma wishes she could have just carried on like any other student – enjoying the social life, nights out and uni work.
She says: “I wish I could have just carried on with second year as normal. I would have preferred spending hours in the library over lying in the hospital bed any day.”
Emma reflects on the past year: “It still doesn't feel like it really happened to me. I look back at photos or think back to certain times throughout my treatment when I was really poorly and I just think 'no that's not me...' It just doesn't feel real.”
Once Emma had been given the all clear by doctors and had fully recovered from the Cancer, she returned back to uni:
"It was hard going back to uni because my uni friends were now all in third year, whilst I was re-taking my second year again."
To raise awareness of Acute Promyelocytic Leukaemia, Emma regularly posted comments on her social media pages; Facebook and Instagram, to tell the story of her journey through Cancer.
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Emma gives her advice to anybody who suffers now or in the future with Cancer.