Life in my body... after cancer in my twenties s Emily Cooper,
22, from Leicestershire, on how Hodgkin’s lymphoma changed her life
itting in a hotel room in Paris, my boyfriend, Jack, and I were about to head out for a meal to celebrate my 21st birthday. Suddenly, I began coughing up blood. Jack was terrified and felt helpless; I was in shock. That was in October 2018, but the truth is I’d been feeling out of whack for a while. At the beginning of the year I’d caught a cough that I couldn’t shake. Sometimes I became so breathless that I couldn’t walk down a flight of stairs.
Doctors referred me to a respiratory specialist, but it kept getting worse. I lost two stone in a few months.
When I got back from Paris, I became so ill that I took myself to A&E. After countless tests, I had a biopsy and, in early November, I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma, one of the most common cancers in young adults.
At first, I struggled and distanced myself from the diagnosis when I told people. I’m used to saying “cancer” now, but at the time I feared it and would talk about my