DIAGNOSED WITH BLOOD CANCER AT 21, SIGNS & SYMPTOMS, HOW IT HAPPENED | Olivia Rose Smith

looking back and just being like I don't want to lose my hair it's so unfair there a point still where like so my getting ready for a night out and all my friends are doing the hair and curling the hair and I just got upset because I don't want to do my hair and now I'm saying that out loud it sounds really really stupid but I can tell a pissed year I guess you don't get how horrible it is to have that stripped away from you hi guys welcome back to my channel so today is a slightly different video it's something that I've not talked about in a really long time on my channel and that is cancer so it's blood cancer awareness month in September and I really want to do all I can to raise awareness of this and help people know the symptoms and know what to look out for so this is the first thing that I'm gonna do is tell my story and help explain what to look out for some of you may or may not know I had blood cancer in 2018 so it's really important to me to make a video about this and raise awareness because I know that before I was diagnosed I have no idea that it even existed I think I'd heard of leukemia and I'd heard obviously of people getting blood cancer but I knew nothing about the type of cancer that I had and I didn't know anything about signs and symptoms and yeah I was really lucky that I caught it quite early on but I know a lot of my friends who have had the same thing didn't catch it early enough and it's been a quite different story to my story so that's why it's so important to me to raise awareness of my type of cancer so that hopefully I can save the life I know I know that by making videos like this it actually does save lives I've had messages before saying thanks to your profile and you raising awareness I've managed to discover that I had cancer and I caught early on and that's thanks to you so obviously I want to keep doing what I'm doing I know it's been a really long time since I've really made any content about cancer because I felt like I needed to move on personally from what happened I know that it's been a really long time since I've made any content about cancer and about my experience so there might be a few of you on my profile you had no idea that this even happened or you might know that I had cancer but you don't know what type there's so many reasons why I need to make this video I thought a good way to start the video would be to talk about the signs and symptoms of the cancer that I had and then after that I'll explain my personal story and happened and how I discovered did it happened and everything like that so some of the more like most common symptoms of lymphoma ah weight loss fatigue itchy skin a recurring infection that you can't seem to get rid of swollen lymph nodes so I had a lump there but that came up night sweats and what House shortness of breath a cough that you can't get rid of and a really weird and random one actually is a pain in your chest when you drink alcohol and so these are all like really weird symptoms that I think you wouldn't necessarily associate with cancer I definitely didn't I didn't know that these are things that I should look out for and I think that's why this cancer is so easily missed because you can write these things off so many other things like I was tired but I thought I've been really busy so that's why I was losing weight but I wanted to lose weight so I didn't see it as like a necessarily a bad thing I was you're going to the gym more than I ever had them before and yeah I think I just wrote everything off as being something else and that is because I didn't know that they were symptoms to look out for I'd never heard of lymphoma and I think had I known and maybe if I'd watched a video like this I would have caught that quite early on and that wouldn't have been six months of turn and Froemming from the doctors and they're missing it as well as me actually which is crazy because Hodgkin's employment which is the type of cancer I had is the most common cancer in people our age so in our age is even more common the breast cancer and all of the other types of cancer that you hear of all the time this cancer is way more common so it was strange that it was missed by the doctors but maybe if I'd been more more aware of it myself then it wouldn't have missed I think I'll start talking about my story now so I was 21 I was at University and I was I just finished my second year and it was the summer and it was like I don't know maybe May when they started when my from alcohol I got a pain in my chest I feel like I've told this story so many times it's like a rehearsed thing now it's so weird and I don't get emotional when I tell it because it's almost as if I'm telling someone else's story because I know it off by heart I don't necessarily have to think back it's so weird how like that happens but I know so many other people said that they feel the same telling their story so if you think this is just like sliding off the time when she doesn't care it's probably because I spoken about us so much now I yeah so I got pain in my chest when I drunk alcohol and I went to the doctors and I saw a doctor and they were like I can't think of any reason why like those two things would be associated so she was like maybe it's anxiety so I wrote it off as anxiety as well I just thought like it was a pain that I'd made up in my head but the pain persisted and it would come even when I wasn't thinking about it so I was like I know is a real pain because it would come before I thought of it so it wasn't made up I know it and so I went back to the doctors and I saw a different doctor this time and they diagnosed it with something called costochondritis which is basically a pulled muscle in your chest and I was on painkillers for that which weren't helping at all and the pain was getting worse you would have thought I would just stop drinking alcohol I didn't I'm a bit of like a partier I love to have doing with my friends so I didn't start basically I was taking the painkillers and they weren't helping and then I start to notice that my rib cage was like protruding out a little bit in the place with her and I was like there's so much pressure there I know that there's like something growing in there and everyone was like you're being absolutely ridiculous like there's nothing there it's it's a pulled muscle so that's what the pain is but I went back to the doctors again and I was like I can feel a lump and he couldn't feel it but I just felt so much pressure in my chest I knew there was something there and I just said like it really feels like there's something that I need to like get out of my chest and then a rash came up on my neck and I called the doctor and I said that I should come up and they said to come in and see them so they were looking at the rash and they were kind of feeling around my neck and I've been feeling around my neck as well and I said like I've noticed that there's actually like a bit of a lump under where the rash is as well and it's actually crazy that the rash is what took me there but the real thing that I should have gone about was the lump because that was another tumor so yeah they sent me for a scan at the hospital like a straightaway after I found that lump because they I think that then it just twig like lymphoma she's got a braised lymph node pain in her chest pain when she drinks alcohol tiredness loss of weight I just feel like I should have been picked up so much sooner than it did but it didn't obviously we caught it early enough so yeah that's when I went to the doctors and I mean the hospital and I went for a chest x-ray and then the chest x-ray it was sent straight back to my prof. and he said to me like I'm 90% sure that this is cancer and me and my mum was so shocked I think we weren't expecting it at all and even to the point like when we went and got in the car after the appointment I went to my mum night war live obviously got it haven't I and she was like yeah I think you didn't we were just like what do we do now so like we called my family home and we told them but it definitely still didn't even sink in that I don't think it wasn't until I physically like had a diagnosis like they knew it was counselor they couldn't tell me what when it was until I'd had a biopsy so I went in for an operation which is what that scar is there they removed a lymph node one of the ones that was swollen and they like put it under a microscope and then they were able to tell me that it was Hodgkin's lymphoma which was a bit of a relief actually because that is like a really easy treated cancer with like a great prop gnosis so I was really lucky to get a cancer that has had a lot of research and a lot of people have had it in the past and the treatment is like really progressed and so yeah after I'd had like the official diagnosis I think that was about two weeks in between the official diagnosis and the initial scan which was such a confusing time because like there was a part of me that was like maybe it's not cancer maybe it's actually just nothing and I think I just clung on to that until they've wronged me more like so it's Hodgkin's lymphoma as we feel and I was like still in denial a little bit I think but then they were like so we're gonna start chemotherapy on Monday and I was like Jesus like I'm actually having chemo and it's a crazy crazy thought because I think chemo it's so like built up in your head to be such a terrible treatment and don't get me wrong it is but it's in my head was that you the most petrifying thing because you see it in the films and you see people looking so poorly when they have it and it was just like oh my god I'm not Jelena so I had six months of chemotherapy and after the first two cycles so I had six cycles of it which is actually 12 infusions which takes so long by the way I was in that all day plugged into her yeah I had two cycles and then I had a scan and like that scan I found out that I was in remission but they wanted me to do all of the treatment just to ensure that it was all gone and oh my god that's just the most like I don't know what the word is to have a treatment for a cancer that you know is no longer inside you it's just like heart-wrenching it's so difficult to feel motivated to continue doing the treatment when you know that it's already worked but it was like a belt and braces approach they just wanted to make sure that I wouldn't come back so yeah I finished the chemotherapy after six months for now like thirteen months since having chemotherapy and that time has gone so quickly I feel like in those 13 months I've lived more than I ever did in the 20 years prior to the diagnosis because like you know how fragile life is and you're taught so much in that time and just spend six months of your life kind of like watching the world go by because you can't live properly you really can oh let's cruise ship to have your life buttonhole didn't feel like you can't do anything teaches you how much that is out there that you do want to do and it just like motivates you that when the treatment is over I'm going to do this this and this I'm going to make sure I do it really well and I think that's exactly what happened to me like I told my story all the way through treatment and I knew that I've always wanted to work in fashion so I took what I gained through cancer which was a following on social media and I kind of turned that around to be focused on something that I'd always wanted to work in and yeah I'm really proud of the way that it all started and I'm also using my platform to try and help other people so I don't know if any of you know I started a movement called cancer chicks which is for young women like me who have been diagnosed with cancer to basically connect them and help them feel confident through the diagnosis and kind of still feel like themselves as impossible as that is because your identity has just totally ripped away from you I was trying to portray that like you are still you and you are still interested in things that you're interested in and you're still going to have time to be you you are you're not like becoming the disease that you've been diagnosed with so that's still something that's really important to me because I know how many people that resonates with because yeah everything does just get stripped away from you and I was so scared to become known as the girl who had cancer that I wanted to make it into something positive that made sense so another of the reasons that making this video so important to me is because if it's caught early enough so my mistake too the treatment is so much more effective in the in the upcoming months and years after your treatment it's more likely that it won't come back so one of my best friends Georgie who I met through this whole experience has was Stage four and she had the same treatment as me and she was in remission when it finished but a few months later it came back and now she's having to have treatment again so I think and she agrees with me the more we raise awareness the more people are going to catch these symptoms early on and hopefully the more people will be able to have the treatment so unit and it all will be over and never will come back thank you so much for watching the video and if you do fancy it subscribing to my channel I would absolutely love that or if you wanted to head over and follow me on instagram my instagram handle is at olivia aerosmith i will put that on the screen now I hope you enjoyed the video and hopefully I'll see you guys again soon

Channel: OLIVIA ROSE

Views: 212,236

Keywords: blood cancer, lymphoma, hodgkins lymphoma, cancer awareness, olivia rose smith

Id: qoTL4XHqnh0

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 02 2019