Bruises by a bus
TRIP OF A LIFETIME
make her way around the country as planned. But things changed drastically during a six-hour trek through the jungle. She said: “Usually I’d be bounding ahead, but I was having to stop and sit down every five minutes. My body couldn’t cope.”
Over the following week, Ella’s condition dramatically declined.
She added: “My bones were aching and I was covered in so many bruises that I looked like I’d been hit by a bus.”
Ella decided to visit a doctor, who told her that she probably had a low platelet count and ran some blood tests - sending the results back to her GP in the UK for a second opinion. She felt so unwell she decided to go home and was on the verge of booking a flight when she received a call from the Colombian doctor, urging her not to travel.
“I had no idea what was going on. I was told, ‘Don’t get on a plane - come straight to hospital,’” she said.
Communicating using broken Spanish and a translation app on her phone, she was told that she had leukaemia - a form of cancer affecting the bone marrow and blood cells. Ella’s mum Jane and dad Kevin had been told her diagnosis by her doctor in the UK and were flying over to be by her side. Over the next week, Ella had seven blood transfusions and five bags of donor platelets pumped through her body.
The treatment stabilised her enough to fly home. Once back in the
UK, Ella went to
Huddersfield Royal Infirmary for a biopsy, before being transferred to the larger St James’ University Hospital in Leeds, where it was confirmed she had acute lymphoblastic leukaemia (ALL), which is characterised by an overproduction of immature white blood cells, known as blast cells.
According to the charity Leukaemia Care, which has been supporting Ella throughout her journey, ALL accounts for less than one per cent cases of cancer in the UK.
Ella said: “I later found out that, at the time of my diagnosis, 90 per cent of my blood had been invaded by cancer cells.”
She underwent different types of chemotherapy before preparing for a stem cell transplant – but two days her op, tests showed she had relapsed. “I didn’t believe them at first as I felt absolutely fine,” she said. “Doctors then decided to refer me for CAR-T treatment, but as it involved harvesting my blood cells and sending them away to be reprogrammed to fight the cancer, the coronavirus created some delays in getting them back. While I waited, doctors struggled to keep the cancer at bay. It was developing really fast.”
In June, Ella began CAR-T treatment at Manchester’s Christie Hospital and is now awaiting tests to see how successful it has been - with her consultants remaining hopeful that it has eradicated all traces of cancer.
Ella, is keen to shine a light on Leukaemia Care’s Spot Leukaemia campaign to raise awareness of the six most common signs of the disease fatigue, shortness of breath, fever and night sweats, bruising or bleeding, bone and joint pain and repeated infections.
She said: “I am the perfect example of somebody who never believed this would happen to me.”
Ella is working closely with the charity Leukaemia Care’s ‘Spot Leukaemia’ campaign to raise awareness. Find out more at www. spotleukaemia.org.uk