Dudley mum, Helen Hickman, 46, spotted a blood blister on her arm in March 2021 and after a hospital visit was diagnosed with Melanoma - a type or skin cancer. After bouts of surgery she was told the disease had been beaten but, less than a year later, was back in the doctor's office receiving the world-collapsing news that the cancer had spread to her abdomen and lungs and was at stage four - giving her only 'a couple of years' left to live.
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00:00I noticed a mole on my arm here that had started changing. It looked like a little blood blister
00:19on my mole here. So I left it a few months and it had got bigger and bigger so I went
00:26to see my GP and he said that he thought I had cancer and did an urgent referral to
00:33the local hospital. I kind of thought it was a bit of a joke. I came back and me and my
00:39partner laughed about it. I didn't think it was serious at all. You don't think that cancer
00:46is going to hit you in your 40s.
00:56You think we've like skin cancer. As many people said to me when I was first diagnosed,
01:06they cut it away and that's it. It's nothing to worry about. You never think that it's
01:11going to spread internally, which is what happened with me. It spread into my abdomen.
01:25As things happened, I had a PET scan. They found cancer in my lungs at this point. Everything
01:32was kind of put on hold. There was a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between doctors and surgeons.
01:37I think, which I know has happened to many other people in my situation, I could have
01:42started treatment straight away while they're discussing what route to go down. My son is
01:50on his early 20s. I just felt terrible. I thought, you know, I'm not going to live to
01:56say 50. I felt devastated. Without cancer research, I wouldn't be here sitting talking
02:07to you now. My treatment's extremely new and it's all down to research going on in the
02:13cancer and the oncology world. There needs to be a big turnaround in the way cancer patients
02:21are initially treated, diagnosed and seen to by an oncologist. We shouldn't have to
02:28suffer and worry. We already go through enough being diagnosed with cancer as it is. Most
02:35of us, luckily, will survive cancer, but it's not good enough. We should all be able to
02:42have the option to survive.