What mattered was being alive

SHAE ECCLESTON, 32, a creative consultant and author, lives in Dunstable.

THE lump on the right side of my neck appeared without warning in August 2010. Pea-sized and quite hard, it wasn’t painful, unless I turned my head sharply. In fact I would have ignored it had my mum not persuaded me to see the GP — who thought it was nothing. But I went back a week later — at the insistence of my aunt, a nurse — and was referred to hospital.

I was told the only way to get a conclusive result was to operate. I thought: ‘How bad can it be?’

I couldn’t have got it more wrong. The surgery lasted nine hours as doctors discovered a large malignant tumour.

To remove it they had to cut from behind my ear right down my neck and under my chin. When I finally looked in the mirror three days later I was horrified: I had this huge bright red scar curling from my ear down my neck, and my face had drooped where the nerves had been damaged.

I could have gone to pieces. But the specialist later explained that I had an

aggressive form of cancer which could have killed me within three months. After that, worries about my appearance vanished. I was just glad to be alive.

Two years later, just as I was starting to feel better, I was horrified to feel another swelling in the same place. I had a fourhour operation through the same scar — It was cancer again.

It took until 2015 before I began to pull myself together. I threw myself into developing my business. I also found myself worrying less about my scar. I used to wear my hair down after the first operation but I stopped doing that. These days, if people ask about it, I say I had cancer — ‘had’, as in the past. The scar is proof that I’ve moved on.

EXPERT COMMENT: Dr Hextall explains: ‘A scar is only ever 80 per cent as strong as normal tissue and can be quite tough to cut through. But it’s common for surgeons to perform a new operation through an old scar. It means they won’t be giving the patient a second scar and they can often tidy up the old one.

Dr Ashworth adds: ‘The reason Shae still gets pain is that many important sensory nerves cross the neck and there may be nerve damage. Old scars like this can cause pain, but as time passes there should be improvement.’