I don’t remember what we spoke about leaving the hospital. I just remember saying over and over “that’s big, really big” and the numbers, 10 to 12cm rushing round my head. It didn’t seem real. 

I had convinced myself that it was a Pheo and with no size indication until this point I just hadn’t even realised it could be something of that size. The walk from the hospital to the tube station found us passing a café and we both needed to use the toilet and my partner wanted a coffee so we stopped in briefly. I took the chance to call mu mum. 

My mum was shocked. We all were. None of us expected it to be that big and the fact I would be having yet more appointments came as such a blow. We spoke about all the symptoms I had been experiencing, trying to figure out when they started.  Building a timeline in our heads that could piece together this puzzle. 

But what were my symptoms? 

Although I was aware that all of these things had happened to me but I hadn’t put them all together as symptoms of the same issue. 

 

So, back to the point these are just a few the things the endocrinologist asked if I was experiencing. The answer to all was a big fat yes. 

1. increased body hair

2. deeper voice 

3. rounder puffy face, known as moon face

4. adrenal belly, this is where you get a large swollen belly, almost like a beer belly and the rest of your body looks slim.

5. being hot all the time, and having hot flashes

6. Being clammy and sweaty 

7. Tachycardic episodes, these would lead to me feeling really dizzy

8. acne  

Every symptom I was told was caused by me  overproducing cortisol and  testosterone. That my levels of testosterone was at about the levels  a 13 or 14  year old boy would have. 

This was another blow. For so long, I had felt so unattractive. But also like I was making up so much of the symptoms, or at least making them worse in my head than they actually were. So in a weird way it felt very validating to be told not only were they real, but that there was potentially an identifiable cause. 

With that we wrapped up because it was getting late, and so armed with slightly more information, but still not enough. We set off home. To wait for the call to have my PET scan. 

The wait felt like a lifetime, it was two weeks but it felt so much longer. During this time, all that I could do was research. I needed answers and all the information I now had suggested that it, as he indicated to me, was potentially cancer. I am not superstitious  but I was terrified to say it out loud, just in case it made it true. I held onto the worry for most of that first week. Each time the thought would cross my mind, I would talk myself out of it, convince myself it wouldn’t be true, that because he said there was a chance it was cancer, must mean there was a chance it wasn’t, and that, surely was more realistic.