Well in 2001 I was involved in a car accident with a lorry and I was injured in the car accident. And a year later I still had problems with my back, so I went to my GP and he said I should go for an x-ray to check there was nothing wrong. I went for an x-ray at my hospital near my university and they said they'd found something wrong with my back, but they'd also found something above or in my left kidney.
So I went back, this was around Christmas time, I went back after the holidays for another x-ray and they'd seen something again, they didn't think it was the x-ray machine, they thought it was something to do with my kidneys. So I went back again and I was sent for a CT scan, and the CT scan showed a large mass above my left kidney which had calcified.
So from there things happened pretty quickly, I went to see a consultant surgeon a couple of weeks after I'd been for the CT scan and he said he believed that the car accident had caused me to have a blood clot in, above my left kidney and that whatever, it needed to come out; because it was fairly large and it shouldn't be there. So from then we waited, I went through and had another test to check my adrenalin levels so I had to do a couple of twenty-four hour catecholamine tests. These showed extreme, extremely elevated levels of dopamine so I had to again repeat the, the catecholamine tests several times and the results were the same.
I went in for surgery and everything went well, I had an open adrenalectomy, where they removed my left adrenal gland. Now previously nobody had ever mentioned adrenal glands to me, I didn't even know I'd got an adrenal gland [chuckles]. So it was pretty, pretty confusing. The morning of the surgery they said you know, “You do realise you're having your adrenal gland taken out and you might lose your spleen?” Well every, everybody was sort of very confused as to what we were, what was happening but I, I did have my adrenal gland removed, I did have a bleed on my spleen but that, that stayed intact luckily.
When I came round I'd been in theatre for quite a while, I came round and I was very poorly, I was in, the high dependency unit where they said that I'd, they'd removed a large mass from my left adrenal gland but we weren't given any other further information. I was in hospital for a further two weeks and at the end of two weeks the results came back from the pathology lab saying that I'd actually had a cancer that was, that was termed as a “ganglioneuroblastoma” which is very rare as I'm led to believe. The surgeon actually had never seen anything quite like it before, I was quite a novelty amongst the hospital, everybody knew me and my diagnosis. |