This is my beautiful, glamorous, very good friend Pauline Hatton – here is her story in her words.
It’s a sad, bad, lonely day when you’re given the Cancer diagnosis.
It is true that time stands still and you feel yourself going right in, there’s no way out just in and whatever happens to you now you’re not going to like it, you’ve got to give everything of yourself, your body, over to the treatment, whatever that entails, if you want to continue to live.
November 2015 after a couple of months of extreme pain I was sent for a CT scan where it was discovered I had lung cancer but it had developed on the outside of my upper left lobe and made itself a little home in my rib cage, but on the plus side I was taken seriously about my pain and now prescribed proper pain relief. A plan for 6 weeks of intensive chemotherapy and radiotherapy running concurrently was set up for the Jan and Feb 2016. Surgery was set up for the April.
My surgery consisted of cutting through the collar bone and then removing some ribs and the nasty thing, and the upper left lobe, the reconstruction of chest wall was done by taking the Latissimus Dorsi muscle from my back and using that. It does all sound so simple but that lot took around 12 hours performed by two highly skilled teams consisting of thoracic and plastic surgeons and I am truly and forever grateful.
In the June part of the scar had to be reopened when a hematoma had to be removed which came from the original surgery… just injury.
Nov 2016 further devastating news … I’m feeling really ill and procedures find lung cancer in my biliary tract but this is unheard of, strange even … I’m told we can try radiotherapy but it won’t get rid of it only slow it down for a while.
I said “ if it shouldn’t really be there it will go away because it would be like putting a palm tree on the North Pole it just wouldn’t grow.”
5 weeks of radiotherapy to the abdomen.
It did GO much to everyone’s amazement.
This is very much an outline of my personal story for the beautiful Scars series created by my special friend Barbs 
who also was by my side and was a constant support on some of the darkest days.
who also was by my side and was a constant support on some of the darkest days.
