I had just graduated from 4 years at university and was having a summer of travelling Colombia for 7 weeks. It was a very exciting time for me. I had no specific plans, but so many opportunities to take once I had returned from travelling. I had been feeling very tired for weeks whilst I was finishing uni and still when I moved back home, however I was putting it down to my busy lifestyle. The day before I set off I nearly fainted after horse riding and had to lie on the ground for a good ten minutes before I was able to get back up again due to dizziness. After this episode I went straight to the doctor as I had never experienced anything like this in my life. When I was there, everything was looking fine. After a conversation with the doctor we put it down to the combination of exercise and the heat, so I thought no more of it and off I went travelling the day after.
Nothing much improved when I arrived in Colombia. I spent the first day in bed, feeling too sick and dizzy and shattered to do anything. After a few rest days things improved and despite feeling tired quite a lot of the time I put it down to altitude sickness and jet lag. During the rest of the trip I started to notice how unfit I felt. Things that I usually was well capable of doing, turned out too much of a challenge. I couldn’t go hikes anymore after one very traumatic trek where I felt like my body was literally going to shut down. Going out and drinking became difficult as from 5 o’clock I was just so tired.
At this point, despite how silly it seems now, I was still convinced it was just the intensity of travelling, altitude sickness, changes in climate, lack of sleep and being so busy or assumed I had anaemia or my thyroid was playing up (I have underactive thyroid which has been fine for about 8years). Basically, I could think up so many reasons as to why I was feeling this way. Leukaemia kept coming up in my search feed when I googled my symptoms, but thought nothing of it because I wouldn’t have cancer, right!
After a few weeks, I started to notice how tired I looked with sunken black eyes and pale skin and it was then I really started to become concerned as I had never looked like that before. I began to find bruises all over my body, which continued to get worse. I looked so much like I had been in some sort of accident, people started commenting and asking me what had happened.
When it got to the point that I couldn’t do anything from fatigue and the bruising was only getting worse, I finally contacted a doctor. Every part of my body ached, I was so tired all I could do was lie down all day and pushing myself only made me sick and dizzy. The doctor sent me for blood tests the next day, and we moved up the coast to the next place while awaiting results. The bloods took a few days to come back and, in the meantime, I was able to just relax on the beach all day as we had a really nice, chilled out hostel on the beautiful Caribbean coastline.
When they finally came back, it wasn’t looking good at all. My counts were all over the place and my mum and I decided that I was to fly home as soon as possible. This was devasting enough as I was so sad my amazing trip was ending 4 weeks early and I was missing out on so much. Things got more serious when my mum rang me after phone call with our local doctor in England. I was told I was unable to fly due to the state of my bloods I and had to immediately go to hospital. I was so confused by this point with what the hell was going on and scared at the fact I would be stuck in Colombia for the foreseeable future, not travelling round having a great time like I had planned, but repeatedly visiting hospitals until I was allowed home (is what I imagined).
After a 2 hour drive to the nearest city and with the help of our amazing hostel manager, we got to a hospital and much to my shock, after few hours rather than returning to the hostel with some mild diagnosis and medication as expected, I was sent to ICU. From then on it was all rather a wild experience. I was treated in such an undignified way it just ended up being hilarious (don’t get me wrong the medical treatment in Colombia was amazing and they couldn’t have done it better but the wellbeing side was rather non-existent). I was stripped of all my clothes and belongings which were sent back with my friend, it was only after begging the nurse, in the best Spanish I could speak, to let me have my phone. The next day with my phone now dead, I entertained myself watching Colombian TV, in between having every test under the sun. I didn’t even know why I was there, it was whether because no one had told me or I didn’t understand anyone. My Spanish wasn’t the best and the Colombians have such a thick accent and talk so fast it was hard to tell what they were saying anyway. The first time I slightly panicked was when I heard ‘blood transfusion’ in the midst of some other Colombian jabber. I had no idea what it entailed but it sounded serious and it sounded painful.
Sometime that afternoon I was moved to another hospital, as I was first admitted to a private hospital named ‘Perfect Body Clinic’(sad times I didn’t want any work done while I was there). I was again refused any belongings and this time cried until they let me have my phone. After that things calmed down a bit. It ended up being a pretty funny week. Despite the circumstances, being stuck 24/7 in a foreign hospital with your parents and best friend generates some laughs. It was all so crazy you just had to laugh. The fact I wasn’t allowed to leave bed (something even now I don’t understand why, I was perfectly okay to walk around) led to bed baths at 4am every day, calling ‘chi chi’ or ‘pee pee’ whenever I needed to go to the toilet (everyone including the nurses laughed at this as it was the only way to get across the language barrier). I was naked apart from a hospital nappy and gown for the first few days until my parents arrived (I kept asking why this was necessary without ever getting a straight answer). I was sure the staff were treating me like this for a laugh because, I thought, surely this wasn’t how they treated patients normally. After a few days they seemed to relax and I was finally allowed belongings brought in and I was finally not naked in a nappy. Woo! Big step in the right direction.
During the week I had about 6 blood transfusions and 2 platelet transfusions. Transfusions ended up not being so bad after all, being just like a drip in a cannula and no pain at all. The reason I couldn’t fly was due to my platelets being so low and the reasons for all the transfusions. The main aim of the hospital was to get these to a reasonable level so I could fly home. Mine were at 10 and had to get to 50, with an average person being between 150 and 450. I finally hit 50 after a week of being admitted to hospital and in the meantime diagnosed with Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. It was and wasn’t a shock as everything up to this point had been so eventful and crazy and going through it nearly all on my own at the other side of the world had toughened me up by this point. When the consultant arrived to tell me the news of the diagnosis my parents had gone out to get food and clothes for me, so, after allowing myself about half an hour of panicking with the help of my boyfriend on the phone back in England, I pulled myself together. I decided there and then I was going to be as positive as I could be through this whole situation. I made plans of everything I could do now I was stuck at home for at least a year, from the start I just really tried to focus on how I could make the most out of what was going to be a very shitty time of my life.