Katrina's story - transcription
I live in Edinburgh and I work as a nursery nurse with children with special needs. I was diagnosed with cervical cancer on the eve of my 27th birthday.
I found out that cervical cancer is the second biggest killer, in women, next to breast cancer.
So now that there is an immunisation programme available to young girls, hopefully this new immunisation programme is going to save lives and it will prevent young girls from getting the Human Papilloma Virus and going through the awful treatment that I've had to have.
I started having symptoms in May 2007. The first symptom I had was an abnormal discharge and then it progressed into abnormal bleeding in between my periods.
In September 2007 I had a smear which came back with severe abnormalities and then I was referred to the colposcopy clinic and it was on the 29th of October 2007, last year, that they told me that I had a large tumour on my cervix and that it was very suspicious. It looked as though it was going to be cancer.
The consultants told me that a hysterectomy was the best treatment at the time but I didn't want to have a hysterectomy because I knew I would lose my womb and my ability to have children. So I begged them and begged them to do another operation which is called a radical trachelectomy that removes the cervix but leaves the womb intact but my cancer was too advanced so on 11th December 2007, last year, I had a hysterectomy.
It was quite traumatic and I found it really emotional, really hard but unfortunately the hysterectomy wasn't enough and they found that the cancer had spread into my pelvis and it was in my lymph nodes.
So I had to have five weeks of chemotherapy and daily radiotherapy and at the end of the treatment I had to have what's called brachytherapy and that's internal radiotherapy into the top of the vagina to blast all of the cancer cells.
I didn't really want to have the treatment and I know it sounds terrible but I knew that, after my hysterectomy they left my ovaries and I knew that the treatment would destroy the only bit of womanhood I had left.
I was trying to, sort of, recover from surgery, recover from treatment and now deal with a menopause.
I felt extremely emotional and just devastated. I felt like... it felt almost like a bereavement really losing, you know, my fertility.
A month later I had a check-up and the consultant said that I was clear and I was obviously really relieved but physically I didn't get any better so they sent me for another MRI scan which flagged up an abnormality in my pelvis and they said that if it was a recurrence it would be incurable so it was at this point in my cancer journey that I realised that my illness was life... you know, obviously I knew it was life threatening but I didn't appreciate how serious it was and until I had another scan called a PET scan which shows up the body and whether it has cancer cells or not, I realised that I could die, that my life was now on the line.
The results from my PET scan showed that I was clear and that I was in remission and being told that I was clear and free of cancer was just the best feeling ever I felt as if I'd been told I had won the lottery.
It was just such a good feeling and I had a massive party to celebrate and I've realised now that life's too short.
You have to go for your screening and hopefully now that this new immunisation is there for young girls I can't stress how important it is that young girls are vaccinated
