Am new to this site and have been invited to introduce myself. My avatar has been BagLady for the past 20 years so maybe I'll stick to that. I am 69 and come from Jersey in the Channel Islands. I retired early in '95 and set off on my travels around the world, popping home every few years to visit my daughter and grand-children. I hadn't intended to stay away for so long but, you know how it is, one country led to another and, before I knew it, I'd been away for 18 years. By the time I'd reached South East Asia I'd grown weary and settled awhile in Cambodia. I rented a 2 bed bungalow and began to establish a pretty garden and amass a few household belongings. In July 2014 I decided to make one last trip to Jersey to tell my family that I'd be spending the rest of my life in Sihanoukville and that from then on they would have to visit me.
The journey home was long with many stops. By the time I reached Manchester to connect to my final flight I'd been up for 3 nights and was dog tired. It was there that I met with the 'lady from hell' in the form of an obnoxious security guard (but that's another story). Having walked the planet with a bag on my back, I suddenly found that I could walk no further. The pain in my right buttock was excruciating and I thought 'hip replacement'. I rested up for a week or two but the pain didn't abate and I took myself off to the doctor. She was lovely, my Dutch doctor, but they don't listen do they? I told her of my pain but all she could think of was my weight. It stands to reason when you live in a very hot third world country you are going to be skinny. I promised her that with just a few months of good Jersey food and a bit of cold weather I would pile on the pounds and that my problem was my spine. She insisted on blood/urine tests and chest x-rays. It was a total shock to me when the x-ray came back showing stage 4 lung cancer. I had no symptoms whatsoever.
Sure enough, I piled on the weight over the next couple of months, but the bone pain just kept getting worse. Eventually I had to give up my dream of going back to Cambodia and gave away all my worldly possessions to my lovely Khmer neighbours.
So here I am. Two weeks before Christmas and still no diagnosis on my spine. I'm booked for an MRI on 19th December. It's purely academic now but, as you will appreciate, I just want to know what has caused me to lose the last year of my life to pain.
