Brave city teenager who received bombshell cancer news gives back
A courageous teenager from Edinburgh saw her life turned upside down by a sudden cancer diagnosis in the middle of her exams.
Emily Kyles, 18, was preparing to study primary teaching at university when she was placed in a medical coma for three days last May having developed sepsis.
The former Liberton High School pupil went on to spend months at the Sick Kids while being treated for leukaemia.
Now on the road to recovery, she hopes to give back to the hospital staff who helped her through difficult times with an online fundraiser.
Emily told the Evening News: “It was May 6 last year I was diagnosed. I had literally just left school two weeks before. I had a couple of exams to sit which I never sat because I was in hospital.
“On May 3, I got a sore leg and the next day it turned into whole body pain. By the 5th, it was really bad and I’d already been on the phone to the doctor the day before. She was like ‘it sounds viral but if it’s just as bad tomorrow, phone again’. So I did that and she said I should go straight to A&E.
“At this point, I had to go to the adults’ hospital. I was there for 11 hours while they were trying to figure out what was wrong. I was lying in a bed in a corridor because they didn’t have any spaces in the actual booths.
“About midnight, they moved me to the acute medical unit and at 5.30 in the morning they came in and said ‘you’ve got leukaemia but you’ve also got a blood disease’, but they couldn’t figure out what it was.
“They later found out that it was sepsis, so that was what was actually making me really unwell at the time. If I hadn’t had sepsis, I don’t know when I would’ve found out about the leukaemia.
“I couldn’t walk, I couldn’t get up to go to the toilet or anything. And when they told me, I didn’t really have a reaction.
“My mum was really upset, obviously, but I didn’t really know how to react because I felt so unwell and I didn’t know what was going on.
“It wasn’t until a couple of hours later where they said to me ‘we’re going to have to put you to sleep for a few days’ because I needed to go on dialysis, basically, and it wasn’t going to be safe for them to do that if I was awake. So they put me into a coma for three or four days, and it was at that point that I started crying.”
Emily later woke up and was moved to the critical care unit at the Sick Kids before spending five months between May and October on the Lochranza Ward. “When I first was in critical care, [they did] nothing cancer related because they had to target the
I don’t know how the staff can stay as positive as they do, coming into rooms like mine, with the state I was in. I have to give so many thanks
sepsis first,” she added.
“They told my mum when I was asleep that the next two hours were critical, so they got all my family in, not to say goodbye but it was like ‘let’s make sure you get to see her’.
“Everything ended up being OK and then they started the chemo in critical care. I had one round of intensive chemo, then a break, then another round. During all of this, I was also having really intense physiotherapy and occupational therapy. I had to relearn how to move. I couldn’t even lift up my arm.
“That’s what kept me in hospital. It wasn’t safe for me to go home because I couldn’t do anything for myself. [I didn’t eat] for a long time and I had to be tube-fed for a long time because my body couldn’t tolerate proper food.”
Those long days in hospital were made that bit more bearable by the presence of friendly staff, family and pals who kept Emily company at the darkest of times.
She continued: “I don’t know how they [the staff] can stay as positive as they do, coming into rooms like mine. With the state I was in, I don’t know how they keep that happy mindset.
“I have to give so many thanks to the physios especially, because every time they came in I would refuse to move or pretend to be asleep and they practically had to force me to get up, but they never got frustrated or annoyed.
“They obviously understood what I was going through. They wanted to help me as much as they could.
“Sometimes there would be groups on where they’d make hot chocolate or cupcakes and they’d invite me to that. Connor worked for the Teenage Cancer Trust and he would come in and just chat to me for however long I wanted to. I had a nurse, Rebecca, who was amazing. She was my favourite. She would come in and sit and chat with my mum for so long that all the other nurses would be like ‘where’s Rebecca?’
“My friend Kirsty was in every single day that I was in hospital. She came in and sat with me and we’d chat, we’d watch TV. I got a PlayStation in my room and we’d play games on that or watch Netflix.”
Emily went on to have a bone marrow transplant in Glasgow and was discharged on January 30. She is now back at home but attends checkups every few months.
She is waiting to ‘ring the bell’ to mark six months cancer-free.