3 minute read
YEREVAN, JUNE 26, ARMENPRESS: The YouTube video is short — just three minutes — but the message is compelling, reports Armenpress citing The Daily Mail.
A single mother, her face gaunt and pale after months of fighting inoperable bowel cancer, talks to the camera in a frail but determined voice.
‘I have a young son and I need to see him grow up,’ she says.
‘The only operation that can keep me alive is a radical sacrectomy, the complete removal of my sacrum.'It’s an extremely difficult, rare and dangerous operation and I can’t find anyone to do it here in the UK.'If anyone out there can help to save my life, please, please get in touch.’ Ruth McDonagh, from Enfield, in Middlesex, made the video last October when she was in the depths of despair.
Her situation was all the more heartbreaking because it was so needless.
If her cancer had been spotted in December 2008, when she first visited her GP with rectal bleeding, she wouldn’t have been at this dreadful point.
Instead, despite being seen by her doctors 13 times over the next two years, her condition was misdiagnosed — even though she suffered a litany of classic symptoms, including bloating, severe abdominal pain and weight loss.
‘I knew the symptoms of bowel cancer so I went back again and again, but I couldn’t get anyone to take it seriously,’ says Ruth, 46, a mother to Brandon, 11.
‘I was fobbed off.’
She became so ill she couldn’t eat, yet extraordinarily a doctor’s note at the time shows she was prescribed a herbal remedy, with the GP noting of her: ‘Admits is neurotic.’
When finally diagnosed in January 2011, the tumour had spread to her spine and she faced a battle to find someone to save her life.
Three months before she was driven to making her video, Ruth had undergone what she thought would be straightforward surgery to remove her tumour. ‘I woke up from the operation expecting to hear I was in with a good chance of a cure,’ she says.
‘Instead my surgeon told me that the 7cm tumour was completely wrapped around the sacrum.’
This is the small triangular piece of bone at the base of the spine.
Many of the vital blood and nerve supplies to the lower body travel through it and, as Ruth’s surgeon explained, to remove it would mean a high risk of death or paralysis from the waist down.
‘He didn’t want to risk it, so he left the cancer intact and sewed me back up again so that we could at least try to find another surgical option,’ says Ruth. Most people would agree that Ruth has made — and deserves — every bit of her own good luck.