Sat here looking at further medical stuff for the crash that ended up with me finding this most excellent site dudes, (guess which movie I fell asleep to last night 
), it made me wonder, how did you react on getting your cancer diagnosis?
I was sitting in the Head specialists office, aching in pain from a fractured sternum, soft tissue damage, ripped muscles etc, he went on about numbers, bad form of the other hospital to send me home, high heart attack risk, followed by a throw away question about how I reacted to water.
A smile and a sigh later on my answer, âOh you have pruritus, guess that means you have Polycythaemia vera (PV) rather than Essential thrombocythemia (ET), will get them to do a quick gene test on your bloods while you pop along and have a pint taken. And see you in a couple of weeks to confirmâ
I shuffle out of the office, emotionally lost, ( just started going through divorce stuff) and trying to get a decent phone signal to look things up. Dr Google was interesting, so ignoring the USA sites, headed for the NHS site, and then via the cancer charities.
But the one thing I remember so clearly, was the relief I felt at having been told I had cancer. It was not the ten or so other illnesses I thought I had been suffering symptoms from over the past years.
After reading up on the symptoms, I had answers,
No, not having dementia, I have cancer brain fog.
No, not being lazy, I was suffering from fatigue
etc etc.
So back to the question. how did you react on the news you have cancer?
Guess I am wondering if I am the only one who reacted with relief?
Hi @clickinhistory
I had just had a gynae op and the gynaecologist said to me âI have never had to tell anyone this before you have Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) , I can do no more for you see your GPâ
Next thing I knew I was walking down a corridor repeating the words Chronic lymphocytic leukaemia (CLL) so I did not forget them, I could see them in my mind with great cartoon zig zags around them.
I also felt as if I was in a weird bubble with the world going on around me.
Because the gynaecologist said âI can do no more for youâ I thought my days were numbered.
I came home and wrote my will and funeral music.
I then had to see my GP and the nurse at the surgery when taking blood said to me âwe did have a leukaemia patient on our books a couple of years back but she diedâ
The GP then referred me to a haematologist.
Little did I know that that was the start of my anxiety, not understanding medical lingo, waiting on others and not knowing.
I was in my bubble for a long time
We are all different @clickinhistory, there is no right or wrong
@Erica that is why I asked the question, as I tend to do with most of my questions, to see if we are alone or actually more connected in our responses.
Even though we had two different reactions, the same issue is the way the medical infrastructure handled the manner of informing us and the support and flow of useful information.
As a friend years ago said at the beginning of the internet, she found out she was not alone with her reactions to her medical condition. Even though she admitted she rarely posted or interacted with the sites, just reading peopleâs words helped her.
Rather than the gift of anxiety the medical profession left you with, got to be one of the worst Secret Santa gifts going
Good afternoon @clickinhistory and @Erica, hope you are both well.
Like pretty much everyone (I imagine) the first reaction was a mixture of shock and disbelief, followed by âDid I hear correctly?â and other words that would get me banned from this excellent support service!
It is very important that we are able to discover that we arenât alone in our daily struggles with whichever cancer we have, even if the same cancer strikes each of us in different ways.
I was on my own at the hospital when the consultant told me, very bluntly and without any preamble, that I had one of the Myeloproliferative neoplasms (MPN)âs, a Rare Blood Cancer and that further tests would be used to âdrill downâ (literally with the BMBâs!) to determine which one I had.
I think one of the hardest events I then had to deal with was telling my daughters and my elderly mother.
Then work.
Then friends followed by my extended family.
All in all, and if I had the option, I would have given blood cancer a miss but, sadly, there isnât a rewind option on life.
Take care everybody and stay safe.
Jimbo165
@Jimbo165 itâs fine, @Erica has her triple layered woolly hat on over her ears, she will not hear those worthy old Anglo Saxon words of your ancestors.
It does become the pebble in the pool of our lives, the ripples it sends outwards.
Like you I was on my own and I wonder if that makes a difference in that there is no second reaction to gauge our own against?
So far, fear, disbelief, shock and my own, relief.
I wonder if others have had a different reaction and how much is it down to the way we are told and the information we are given at the time?
Good morning @clickinhistory, there was, after the initial shock and surprise, a feeling of âah so thatâs what has been wrong with me for so long then!â as the 
lit up. Other of my friends may disagree that this was the only thing wrong with me and who am I to argue with them.
Life on your own does bring a different set of challenges with regard to your own health in the most practical of ways such as who will come with you to appointments etc, as well as, on a personal level, âwho will stay with me for the immediate period after my sabre swallowing session this Friday?â (Confirmed with the Gastroenterology Appointments department 3 minutes ago, phew!!).
My daughters are good at making themselves available to attend my appointments with me now, but as I am having sedation for this procedure (Iâm sorry but my gag reflex isnât very good as I only laugh at funny jokes!) Iâm supposed to have someone with me for the next 12 hours.
As always, keep smiling and be kind to yourself whilst simultaneously taking care and staying safe.
Jimbo165
@Jimbo165 just follow the instructional video I shared above and your will be the rising star on the local village hall and working menâs clubs very quickly. As for your friends, well that is all down to the blackmail stuff you have on them
Interesting that relief came later for you rather than first as for me.
Must be a day for chasing people on the very bad phone lines today. Further medical appointments for the result of injuries from the crash, spine has a degenerative disorder which the crash has speeded up, so they are checking the spleen and neck and shoulders for any other crash injuries. Get bad neck and a numb pins and needles feeling in the fingers of my right hand.
I am sure the four daughters of the apocalypse of your sense of humour will make sure you are escorted as it is cheaper than private security
I didnât really react until after my first transplant and appointments gradually fading away and then I was not sure where I belonged or what had just happened.
On the day of diagnosis I believed I was having another procedure to do with my gall bladder as I had never heard of blood cancer let alone a haematologist. I had rung my gp to say I had to cancel the appointment who said to me I think you better keep this appointment.
I went on my own and thankful I did as I couldnât have coped with someone elseâs emotions.
My consultation was done in a kind and compassionate way and I went on to have a wonderful consultant/patient relationship I trusted her with my life.
She didnât use the word blood cancer and introduced me to myeloma just a few minutes into the conversation. It never crossed my mind I had cancer and Iâm grateful to her for giving me the space to work it out.
I had a bone marrow biopsy there and then and Iâm practical in what was needed to get on with coming out the otherside
I remember getting in my car and ringing my very close friend who listened and I collected my daughter.
Another person I spoke to that day was very kind and I said have I got cancer and they nodded and I said I donât want anyone feeling sorry for me. That conversation set me up for telling my kids as soon as I was home then my brother and friends
I took a few booklets with me and gave them out
I said laugh cry scream and then stay positive for me please.
@2DB I have heard the delayed register, effect before with a friend who had breast cancer, was so busy organising her family it wasnât until a week or so later, her hubby told her to stop, go for a walk, met her oldest friend in the park and in her words, âI filled the lake with tears and couldnât stopâ
She said, she had spent so much time trying to be the strong one, the one who organised everyone, she had stopped trusting them to do the right thing by themselves, she admitted it was her issue with a need to be in control.
We are all so used to trying to be in control of something, especially our own body, that the news our own body has decided to rebel against us, is a hard news to hear and accept.
I love the role Ice cream played in your reaction @2DB , opps sorry, just cleaned my laptop screen and that is not what you wrote, blame @Jimbo165 and @Erica talking of birthday cake and parties on another thread 
When I first got my diagnosis, it felt like a punch in the gut. I was a mix of confused and overwhelmed. Many questions ran through my mind, like âWhy me?â and âWhat do I do now?â It took a bit of time to wrap my head around it.
Great to hear from you again @RolanGoblen, how are doing?
Look after yourself
Hi, @clickinhistory! Itâs so interesting (and moving) to read about other peopleâs reactions to their diagnosis. At the very end of August last year, I saw my endocrinologist and had had a vast panoply of tests done in advance of the appointment as usual, most of which looked OK, but some of which had the little red star next to them, denoting that they were outside the reference ranges. She looked at my haematocrit levels and said that I should go and have a venesection done in the building next door straightaway, so off I went and did that, was given a bottle of Fanta and some glucose biscuits afterwards, then went home. My haematocrit was 63.7 and my haemoglobin was 19.6 (Iâm a 63-year-old female). When I was due to see her in June this year, she was off sick and I saw a locum instead, who looked at the latest set of blood test results and said that I needed to have another venesection. I asked what was happening, why and what else could be done about it. She said it was probably Polycythaemia vera (PV) and we needed to do some investigations to be sure. So off I went and had another venesection, was given a bottle of Fanta and some biscuits and went home.
Now that I had something to look into (Polycythaemia vera (PV)), of course I started reading and researching, found out all about MPNs and Polycythaemia vera (PV), saw that I ticked off nearly all the boxes for Polycythaemia vera (PV) symptoms and decided that I wanted to have any early investigations done here in Nairobi before I move back to Spain - here itâs a capital city with big, specialist hospitals, Iâve been here 12 years and know my way around the health system (and far too many of the doctors know me!) and it would just be so much easier to have it all done here than start everything from scratch over there. Also, after my house flooded out here in the spring I donât know how much longer it will take for everything to dry out so that I can sell it and actually move back to Spain! So I asked my wonderful neurologist who he would recommend that I see and I now have a haematologist who is UK-trained and used to be a consultant at Guyâs & St. Thomasâs and also at Kingâs College in London.
Despite it being pretty certain that it was Polycythaemia vera (PV), the first and second JAK-2 gene mutation tests both came back negative, but from the bone marrow aspiration and biopsy there was no doubt about the diagnosis. While I was still lying on the biopsy bed, the doctor who did the procedure showed me the aspiration fluid and the bone sample and explained why there was no doubt in his mind (he is part of the haemato-oncology team) that it was Polycythaemia vera (PV), so I left there as certain as I could be that thatâs what it was before the official results came back 10 days later. I felt very serious, very calm and very thoughtful, but relieved to know for sure what it was, so that I could move ahead with treatment. I have always been very calm in panicky situations (I had absolutely no idea I was that sort of person until I lived and worked in Beirut and was faced with some very scary situations!) and just got on with more reading and researching about it and deciding who I would tell at that stage. I still havenât told all my friends, but I have now told all my family - not that there are many of us - and Iâm just waiting for the right moment for each of my friends. The fact that I am so far away makes a difference, and my best friendâs parents both died within three weeks of one another in June and she is getting married in early October (Iâm going to be her bridesmaid â the first time I will ever have been a bridesmaid!), so I donât want to tell her before then - she has had more than enough to worry about this year already.
I think it also made a difference that it wasnât the first time I had had a serious diagnosis to deal with. In 2012 I was living in Beirut when I was diagnosed with endometrial cancer. There had been absolutely no hint of it beforehand (until all of a sudden there was clearly something very wrong!) and my gynaecologist was as surprised as I was. He called me on the Friday, told me, asked me what I was doing the following Monday, I said it was a bit short-notice for work, so we agreed that he would remove everything (a radical hysterectomy) on the Wednesday and there we were! Again, I felt remarkably calm about it and was calm telling my friends and family about it, and had the same feeling of being very serious.
In 2015 (I know, if youâre still reading at this point youâre thinking âNot again!â and no, not really again!) I had what was probably the worst way to communicate a diagnosis to a patient. I was in hospital here in Nairobi and had had a brain MRI earlier in the evening when a âpostmanâ came to my room and gave me one of those large envelopes with scan images and a report in it. I took out the report and read it and the only word that I wasnât sure about was âSchwannomaâ, but I knew that anything ending in âomaâ was unlikely to be good news. I looked it up online (of course!) and found that a vestibular Schwannoma was a benign brain tumour. Benign but, in my case, extremely problematic. I rang my bell and asked to speak to the neurologist. They said it was too late to call him, so I asked to speak to the doctor in charge of the ward and after talking to her they told me that she didnât feel capable of interpreting the scan results for me and I would just have to wait to see the neurologist in the morning. But I could interpret them and Iâm not a "ÂŁ*$&^ doctor! So of course I just had to wait for the morning. But even then I was just angry and wondering what would happen next, rather than panicking. Needless to say, there was an enormous amount of trouble within the hospital over the fact that the envelope should not have been delivered straight to me⌠Just in case youâre wondering, in the end, the UN ended up medevac-ing me to the UK, where I had stereotactic radiosurgery on the tumour at the UK centre of excellence for that in Sheffield, as there was nowhere in Africa that offered that treatment.
So three big diagnoses in three different ways in two different countries, each time on my own, but - apart from being angry at the way in which the brain tumour one happened - each time I have reacted the same way, which makes me wonder if our reactions may be more closely linked to us than to the diagnosis itself. I still feel that way now, and of course the Polycythaemia vera (PV) diagnosis is still relatively recent for me, and I do wonder if the way I feel about it will change over time or if itâs just that I am so used to juggling so many health hassles (I have loads of comorbidities - really loads) that this is just one more thing to add to the list.
Sorry this has got so long, but once I had started writing it, it just turned out to be this long!