A UK woman recounts how she had cancer so bad she started planning her own funeral – before undergoing the “mother of all operations” and emerging cancer-free.
Speaking about her cancer diagnosis, Faye Louise, from West Essex, told the BBC in an interview published on Saturday January 4 that she was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer in 2023 after experiencing stomach pains for months.
Doctors first discovered she had an ovarian cyst, but it wasn’t until Louise went into surgery for it that she “heard the horrible c-word” and was diagnosed with pseudomyxoma peritonei, or PMP, she told the newspaper.
According to the Cleveland Clinic, this rare cancer spreads by secreting mucin, a component of mucus, inside a person’s abdomen, causing it to fill with a jelly-like substance.
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Louise, a former model and flight attendant at London’s Gatwick Airport, told the BBC that cancer cells had spread throughout her body and that she would have to have eight of her organs removed, including her spleen, gall bladder, appendix, ovaries, uterus, fallopian tubes, navel, part of her liver and the greater and lesser omentum (which connects the stomach to other organs).
Faye Louise after surgery.
Faye Louise/Instagram
Despite the difficulties stemming from the rare diagnosis, doctors declared Louise cancer-free after surgery in November 2023.
“To be told there was no evidence of the disease was the greatest Christmas present I could have received,” she told the BBC.
Doctors still require Louise to have an annual checkup to make sure her cancer hasn’t returned, but more than a year after the operation, she’s testing positive.
“Waiting for the results will unfortunately make or break every Christmas for me. But you just have to keep pushing forward and never give up,” she told the news outlet. “Some days I fell to the depths of despair, but now I have more positive days more often.”
On the first anniversary of her surgery — November 25, 2024 — Louise candidly wrote in an Instagram post that she has felt many different emotions in her cancer journey, including everything from “numbness” to “joy.”
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“The past year of grueling recovery and everything I’ve endured along the way has been worth it to hear that a year later I’m cancer free,” she wrote. “I can’t thank the nurses and surgeons at Basingstoke enough who worked tirelessly on me in that operating theater for 11 hours. They really saved my life.”
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The former model even went a step further – helping to raise funds for Cancer Research UK and also competing in this year’s Race for Life in Brighton, England, to raise more funds to help other cancer patients.”This is amazing Christmas and moving to 2025, making more memories, seeing new places, my cruise and just knowing cancer won’t get in the way,” Louise added in her post.
Categories: Trends
Source: HIS Education