Doctors told me I was partying too much. That didn’t explain why I was constantly seeing pink elephants and tasting bacon

By Lucy Younger

‘You’ve got cancer,’ the nurse specialist said quietly over the phone. My heart sank. Surely, she’d got the wrong girl, or was reading the wrong results? I’d spent months being told that I was ‘too young’ to have cancer. Surely there was no way I was now being told that the ‘cyst’ on my thyroid was exactly that? Maybe I shouldn’t have been so surprised. I’d been in this exact situation before, three years ago, when it took two years to have my brain tumour diagnosed. When I was 18, I started having seizures and passing out. These episodes started just before I moved to London for university; the doctors told me I was anxious and partying a bit too much – they told me to slow down. I did as I was told. However, after starting university, the symptoms really made themselves known. They were terrifying: I’d see pink elephants and swimming pools, and the salty taste of bacon would fill my mouth. Returning to the doctors, they were convinced I was having severe panic attacks. They told me I was anxious and depressed, and put me on a high dose of antidepressants. Over the next few weeks, fear set in. I was so confused: I was so happy to be in London and having a great time, I didn’t feel depressed at all. I decided to Google my symptoms and for once, Google turned out to be right. I had a tumour on my temporal lobe but no one would listen to me. It took two years. During Covid, I went to A&E after passing out in my kitchen. Once again, I was told I was fine. ‘Young girls like you don’t get brain tumours so you shouldn’t worry’, they said. In a last bid for help, I rang a local pharmacist. Straight away, he told me my symptoms were not normal for a girl of my age. He rang the GP practice and advocated on my behalf, and a GP ordered an MRI scan. I was not the hysterical woman I’d been painted as. Half an hour after the scan, I was told that the brain tumour I was ‘too young’ to have was residing in my right temporal lobe, and I would need a craniotomy – an operation in which part of the bone from my skull would be removed – before the tumour did any more damage. In that moment I didn’t feel shock or sadness – just relief. This ordeal was over. I no longer had to prove myself to doctors and I wasn’t going crazy; I was right that there was something wrong, and I was not the hysterical woman I’d been painted as. Over the next few weeks, fear set in. Fortunately, I was in the hands of a great neurosurgeon and