MCL: Further Diagnosis

Prelogue:
My last post, entitled MCL, has apparently caused a good friend of mine, who is now in the UK, to be unnecessarily worried. He was one of the many people who were there for me, giving me moral and spiritual support. I am thankful and very grateful to him and all the others for their support.

Anyway, don't worry Jest! We were talking about this at work a while ago and Kakkarot suggested that I blog about this. And thanks for your sms.

The blog about my experience with MCL will come in many parts. I would probably punctuate it with non-MCL-related posts. Anyway, many thanks for reading the blog.


MCL ... continued

As I had travelled to Bandar to see the Doctor when he dropped the bombshell that I had lymphoma, I decided to tell the family about it that evening. As soon as I finished telling them, I could hear someone sobbing beside me and some people hugged me tightly. Tears flowed freely that evening. I had never seen my elder brother cry before, but that evening I saw him cried. My sisters who worked on the evening shift came home right away, upon hearing the news. I had sms'ed my friends about the news and my phone never stopped getting messages of support.

The next day, accompanied by more than half of my family, I went to see a more senior Doctor. I had done the CT scan the day before and I was told that the scan did not show that the cancer had spread to other parts of my body, so he concluded that the cancer was still in Stage 1 and my survival rate was said to be quite good.

From that point, I was passed on to the Oncology team of RIPAS Hospital. During one of the consultations with the team, I was informed that the seriousness of mantle cell lymphoma. MCL occurs to less than 1 person per million population and it is considered to be one of the most serious type of lymphoma. There is no known cause of MCL and the rate of recovery is given from 'average' to 'slim'. If one is to be cured from MCL, it could come back and when it comes back, it comes back even worse. And the life expectancy of a cured MCL patient is given from 8 to 10 years. No known of MCL cases had been reported in Brunei and I could possibly the first ever MCL patient in Brunei; one record that I would rather not have. At one point, the team needed to know if the cancer had spread to my bone marrow so I had to undergo this procedure when a needle was used to pierce through my bone to extract some bone marrow samples. It was a nasty procedure and it would require the doctor to really push a needle though the flesh and the bone which was hard and painful. A doctor friend of mine was supposed to do this procedure and she requested to be excused as she could not bear doing this painful procedure to someone she knew. The procedure was done under local anaesthetic, so I could not feel much during the procedure, but it started to hurt when the effect of the anaesthetic had worn off. Again, the result from the bone marrow was negative.

As more tests returned negative or inconclusive results and this being the first known case of MCL in Brunei, doubts started to creep in. Could something be wrong? Could the pathologist who examined the surgically-removed lumps make a mistake? Was it possible that I might have a les serious type of lymphoma? However, at that time, I was determined to get better, so I left the doctors to do what they were paid to do; to cure.