Mouth cancer was missed because I couldn’t get a GP
Nicole Freeman is lucky to be alive after her mouth cancer was misdiagnosed because she couldn’t see her GP in person during the pandemic.
The 25-year-old was four months’ pregnant when she noticed a sore at the back of her tongue in November last year.
Unable to see her GP due to covid restrictions, she had five phone conversations and sent photographs of the sore to her family doctor over five months. each time she was told not to worry because it was an ulcer and she was prescribed Bonjela gel and medicated mouthwash.
it was only when hospital doctors looked at her tongue when she was in labour in March that they insisted on a biopsy and the cancer was diagnosed.
The mother of two, from York, said she was backing the Daily Mail’s campaign.
‘GP’s need to start offering more face-toface appointments,’ she said. ‘if i hadn’t been pregnant i would have been dead by now. My cancer would have been caught much quicker if i could have seen a doctor, instead of sending a picture. You just can’t tell from a picture what is going on.
‘To this day i still have to chase my GP for the simplest thing, such as my medications on repeat prescription. i’ve still had no faceto-face appointments with my GP even though we keep asking.’
Mrs Freeman – who has a second child called Holly, five – also suffers from a neurological condition. She said: ‘My health is rubbish at the moment and i’m in a lot of pain, which could be better managed if GPs were doing their jobs right. instead we have to rely on the district nurse. i haven’t had any morphine to help with my pain for a week because they keep messing up.’
She also said she was ‘absolutely terrified’ when she was diagnosed with cancer, adding: ‘i just looked at my baby girl and cried – she was only a week old. it should have been a happy time but instead i was making every day with my baby count until i had to go into hospital for a month for surgery and treatment.’
Her husband Jake Freeman, 28, added: ‘it was really frustrating. We weren’t getting anywhere with the doctors – there was no support at all. The doctors said if Nicole hadn’t been pregnant and in the hospital to give birth she would’ve died by June.’
Three weeks after giving birth to Nevaeh, Mrs Freeman, who runs a charity for impoverished families with her husband, had a 15-hour operation to remove the tumour and she lost half of her tongue.
Surgeons used skin and veins from her left arm to rebuild her tongue. They also had to remove her lymph nodes in her neck after discovering the cancer had spread.
Mrs Freeman, who uses a wheelchair because of her neurological condition, spent four weeks recovering in intensive care, using a tracheotomy to breathe.
She had to learn how to talk and swallow again, before undergoing courses of chemotherapy and radiotherapy.