Penile Cancer

I got to a point where they decided... they took the drains out because they’d done the job, and I was alright to go home. So I was delighted as you can imagine. I came home and was immobile again. I don’t remember being in any great discomfort at this point, because both sides I didn’t have any swellings or anything. But then I noticed -I’d been home about a week- that the right hand, my right hand groin had started to swell up and swell up hugely. And it was really sore, really, really sore. I phoned, because I’d been given a helpline number, and they’d said ‘it does happen it’s just your lymphatic fluid has nowhere to go. Ordinarily you would…your lymph nodes would deal with it, pass it into your urine and urine it out. But it’s got nowhere to go so it’s just congregated. But nip over in a day’s time and we will… we’ll drain it for you. So I drove, I went over there, got some help again. And they lanced it and they drained it all out and there was just over a litre.

So you can imagine what a litre would look like underneath you. It just stopped me walking, I couldn’t walk. Came home and it did it again. I went over there and got it done again, maybe two, three days later. It got to a point where I was going three days a week and I, it got me down. And I said this has got to stop, when is this going to stop? Eventually it will find somewhere to go. Eventually it will stop. I was starting to feel very ill. I was starting to feel… awfully, awfully poorly. And it was everything was hot. I was hot. My leg was hot, my groins was hot…discoloured. But I’d been told that it’s all normal, it’s all how it should be. And I went over one Sunday because I simply couldn’t stand it anymore, I couldn’t stand the pain anymore. They’d been drained, it had been drained on the Friday and I drove over on the Sunday and I had to wait six hours I think to get it done. Couldn’t sit, couldn’t stand, couldn’t do anything. I’d taken my painkillers with me but I’d run out. They got me some more. They drained it, I thanked them because I get instant relief but I still didn’t feel well, I didn’t feel very well at all. Got in my car, by the time I’d driven back home it was full again. And it just starts to get you down. It starts to get you down. I’m in pain, I’ve been through all this nonsense. So I went through to the other surgery at the other hospital, and my specialist said, ‘No it’s no good this Mark, we’re going to readmit you’. On… within in a second of seeing it was just horrible, it was just horrible. He said, ‘There’s something not quite right, we’ll have to get you in’. So I drove home and I went back in. And by the time I got to hospital- it’s strange how it coincided- I was so ill. They… what they would, what they’d been normally draining had changed its state into a gel. So they couldn’t drain it, they couldn’t drain it. So they started to cut it and try and get it out that way. And it was just an unmitigating nightmare, just a nightmare. And I was in isolation, nobody not telling me why I was in there. I understood it because of the infection but they’d tried various antibiotics to try and sort me and none of them had been successful.

And after a month I went home, and the permanent drain had done its job. But I was sore and I still couldn’t get about and I came home and I had a fortnight at home and the whole thing just repeated itself. It was my left hand side one this time, and the same…it was just dittoed of everything I’ve just said… everything.
 

The consultant did say it was at the lymph nodes in my groin and he told me the left hand side was full of cancer, but the right hand side was clear. But he would do a procedure where he removed the lymph nodes on either side because eventually it would travel to the other side. Well that was the worst time I’ve ever had in hospital that, after that procedure. It just would not heal and I was in hospital quite a long time, more normally than what other people were in and it finished up that the consultant had to do another procedure. Because it wasn’t healing he had to what you call debride where he was.... had done it, because all it kept doing was leaking and leaking and leaking and it was very upsetting.

I was told I would be visited by the nurses, home help, nurses and things like that and they would look after me but they didn’t and the swelling in the groin grew bigger and bigger. Back to the hospital to see the consultant on an appointment and when he seen me he was really surprised and upset at the state of my groin. He said, “Whoever’s let it get into this state” he said “it’s terrible” and he proceeded then to drain my groin and he took litres of the lymph out of it and that caused the wound to reopen in the groin and that’s when I had another four or five weeks in hospital just waiting for it to cure again, but since then I’ve come out really well and the only thing I’m left with is like – I know you can’t see it on camera but one leg that won’t go back to its normality like this leg did and my groin is permanently swollen like a football and it’s very uncomfortable at nights and up to now we haven’t found a way round this problem and until we do like I’ve just got to carry on doing what it is they’ve told me to do and that’s about it really.