Hi, I'm Amanda. I'm gonna be 60 this year. Big birthday coming up at the end of the year. And back in November of 2024, I was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma. Bit of a shock to the system. Really, really unexpected. I found a lump in my groyne, went to the doctor, thought, oh, better get this checked out, a biopsy and a PET scan later, and there I was in front of a specialist oncologist telling me I had follicular lymphoma, which probably like many of you, I'd never even heard of. Um, so yeah, it was a bit of a shock, and the last 6 months I guess have come, I've been coming to terms with what that means and how it affects my life. Um, I'm thankful in some ways that at the moment I'm on what they call watch and wait or active monitoring, but I hate the watch and wait thing. It's just awful, isn't it? What am I waiting for? I went to see the haematologist last week after another round of blood tests and said, what are we waiting for? And he said, Well, we like to say that we're waiting to see if treatment is required. So right now I don't, they've decided not to give me any treatment, which, as I say, at some level I'm happy about another, not really. Um, he said to me that if the lumps that I have are affecting my, um, day to day life, then they will do something about it, but they don't really advise it. So I guess the question I keep asking myself is how do I get on with my life whilst knowing that I've got this strange thing or quite a few things inside my body. I've got groin lumps, I've got lumps in my neck, I've got lumps under my arms, um, and a new one arrives every day and a new one goes every day it seems. Um, he did tell me right at the beginning, it's a lot of waxing and waning. I thought that's what they referred to the moon as doing. I didn't know that that's what they referred to cancer as doing. um, but. I think initially after the shock had subsided, I thought, oh well I'll be fine, and people are much worse off than me, and I haven't got organ cancer, yay, lucky me, and I'll just get on with my life. But really it wasn't as easy as that because all the time it was in the back of my mind and then I knew I was gonna have another um checkup 3 months after the initial one. So I kind of felt like the 1st 3 months where I was absolutely on a knife edge the whole time. Is it gonna get worse? What does it mean? What does the future look like? My son announced that he was getting married. Would I be well enough to be at the wedding, lots of questions going through my mind. And even though I kept up my weekly exercise routines, um, and all the other things I do to stay fit and healthy, it was always there. And then on the February checkup they said nothing had really changed and to come back again in 3 months. And last week I had the second checkup. And thankfully, this time when pushed, I got the haematologist to say to me that he doesn't really expect there to be any major changes in the growth of my uh lymphomas. Probably for a few years, which I thought was quite brave of him. And the reason I'm telling you all of this is because uh my husband and I had decided on the back of this diagnosis that we were going to start living a lot more than we have been living. And what I mean by that is that we decided we were going to book a big trip that we'd been planning for a couple of years. And what I wanted to know from the um haematologist was whether he thought that I would be well and healthy enough to do it, and thankfully he said I was. And. Mentally, it just shifted everything. Um, I was quite surprised by how much I had been living with this anxiety, uh, on a day to day basis. First thing I wake up thinking about how many times in the back of my mind I'd been, hm, why me, how did I get this? I had my spleen removed when I was a child, so therefore my immune system is compromised. Did that make me more susceptible to this um cancer? But at the end of the day, I just decided there is nothing else I can do other than just live every day. Live every day as much and as well as I can. So I'm a bit of an enthusiast when it comes to exercise. We live by the beach. I love walking my dog on the beach every day and I just like to be healthy. I eat relatively well, but I'm prone to the odd. and a bag of crisps and loads of chocolate like everybody else, but ultimately it was about what can I do to stay healthy and fit and keep my brain and my mind as quiet as possible and stop worrying, and that's what I have decided to do because I felt that that was the only way that I was going to move forward with this and live with it.
