Lets begin at the beginning
I first noticed something different in my neck in about October/November 2008. I had just gotten over the flu and both sides of my neck were swollen. The right side went down but on the left side the lump seemed to have stayed. The lump to me seemed to be in the lymph node and I assumed it was from the after effects of the flu. At the time I remember feeling a similar thing in the same spot on the right hand side of my neck. I noticed over the next week or so that the lump on the right had completely gone but the left hand side remained and didn’t seem to be getting any smaller.
Over the month I kept expecting it to disappear as the other had. By about mid December 2008 I realized that it was not going to go away. I decided I would bite the bullet and go and see a doctor. It was about this time I told H about the lump and we named it Herbert.
Since I left the Army in 1999 I had only had one or two check-ups and had always been in reasonable health. When I told the doctor about Herbert he listened to all my information and assumed, as I had, that it may have been related to the flu I had had (which was a relief to me). He suggested that if it hadn’t gone down in about two – three weeks to get an ultrasound of Herbert and he gave me a referral.
I remember about two weeks later Herbert seemed to have diminished in size but after three weeks it was still there so I went in for the Ultrasound on 17 December 2008. When I went in for the results on 22 December 2008 the doctor told me that the ultrasound had found three lumps a couple of which were over 1cm in width, which was concerning and that I would need to go for blood tests and secondly a fine needle aspiration (FNA). The blood tests were done the same day and an appointment for the FNA was made.
The FNA was scheduled for midmorning on December 24rd 2008 - yep what a way to spend Christmas Eve. As I lay on the table the Specialist told me that they would take a tissue sample which involved having a fine needle inserted into Herbert, with the guidance of ultrasound, for the purpose of taking a biopsy for analysis. Once this was done he would take the sample to the attending pathologist to see if there was enough sample to do all the required test. The pathologist ascertained this by having a quick look under the microscope at the sample. The specialist came back to me within 15 minutes and told me that on first appearances the pathologist was not sure what the sample contained and that he would probably need more sample to run the entire range of test. I remember thinking that the first FNA didn’t hurt too much but when he went in the second time I am sure he used an apple corer to get the sample, although when I got home there was little sign of any hole in my neck.
On arriving home the doctor rang with the results of my blood test, Negative. I was relieved nothing was wrong with me but worried that I had gone through getting my neck punctured for what I assumed was no good reason.
I should at this point say that I was, and suppose still am, a firm believer that only sick people see doctors. You just have to look around a waiting room or visit a hospital – sick people everywhere. I also believed that if you don’t visit a doctor you can never get sick. The results of the blood test rocked this belief a little, here I was I had visited a doctor and I still didn’t end up sick – little did I know what the early part of 2009 had in store.