A curious letter has been sent to my mother blaming the tumour in her neck on my birth.
An NHS consultant has come to this conclusion after briefly looking into this very rare neoplasm on her left bulbar nerve, called a hypoglossal schwannoma. It was discovered during a routine head scan monitoring her dementia, which started suddenly last year. Of course, at 82, these things happen.
And although this tumour has only a one in 500,000 chance of developing, I’m prepared to say it’s all to be expected in old age, because what do I know? The medical profession knows best, one would presume.
In any case, this tumour was so rare that it had to be assessed by the Centre for Rare Diseases because it so baffled all the doctors at the local hospital.
After she attended this place with my father (I waited outside), a letter from the consultant arrived. The crux of his theory is that a neoplasm has been in her neck by the skull base for 52 years undetected, since and possibly even because of something that went wrong during my birth.
I intercepted his letter because my parents are both so poorly that I have to help them with everything. I opened it and sat my mother down and went through it with her.
‘Thank you for coming to see me today,’ the consultant began, and then without further ado: ‘You told me that you had a general anaesthetic around 50 years ago prior to the birth of your daughter following which you were found to have a left vocal cord palsy.’ Wait, what?
‘You had a lot of interest and doctors seeing you at that time and at the same time a weakness of your tongue was also discovered. You recently had an MRI scan and CT scans investigating your memory loss. This has picked up a lesion in the region of the left skull base. It is almost certainly likely that you have had a growth there for the last 50 years.’
I had never heard such a thing mentioned before in our family and I’ve heard all the stories about my birth.
It was the very early hours of 1 January 1972 and my mother had a Caesarean after which there was much jollity among the nurses who wanted to ring me in as the first baby of the year, because they had a contest between hospitals to get in the local paper.
Nothing was ever talked of in our family about a vocal cord palsy from that time. The story I was told was that I refused to come out for so long I was first scheduled as a Christmas baby and ended up second born of the year in Leamington Spa. Some other baby beat me to it by one minute, to the nurses’ disappointment.
I turned to my mother and asked whether she had said any of this to the consultant and she said no, but she does have memory loss, so if she said something she might not remember.
What I think she might have done is answer a series of questions about what could have gone wrong medically in her past. And because she has dementia, the only surgery she could remember was giving birth to me by Caesarean.
My 87-year-old father, sitting next to her at this appointment, would have had no better idea of what might constitute the relevant medical history either. Until the past three years they’ve always been very healthy.
Was the consultant searching for historical evidence to explain the tumour, and if so why? Why not simply assume this newly presenting tumour is new, or started in the past few years, which explains why it only just now showed up on a scan, and according to another scan shortly after, has grown in that period?
I was so disturbed about this letter that I wrote to my mother’s GP. I said I wanted it put on record that my family knew of no medical crisis to do with her throat when I was born, and nothing that could have caused a lesion that led to or revealed at that time a rare tumour that she then lived with for 50 years.
And while we’re at it, can we correct another mistake? Stated on my father’s subsequent hospital notes for his heart attack a few weeks after my mother’s tumour appointment, is the sentence: ‘Co-morbidities: Former smoker.’
My father has never smoked, unless you count the experimentation all young men would have done in the 1940s.
What I did witness the young A&E doctor getting out of him, as he lay gasping for breath from a blot clot, was that in his twenties he tried a few cigarettes during his National Service before deciding he didn’t like them, and becoming staunchly non-smoking for the next 60 years.
I find this re-telling of medical history really disturbing.
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