The history of the healing

How I was found to have the disease

My name is Daria, and I would like to tell you my story. It began in autumn 2016, when I lived a quiet and stable life. I had a husband, a job, and it seemed to me that the rest of my life would be like that. I worked as a web-designer, and it was a compromise between what I wanted to do and the money I earned. My life's work was painting, but I knew that I wouldn't be able to make money on it. I didn’t even understand where to start. That’s why I chose a profession that was at least somewhat related to drawing but brought good salary. By 2016, I had been working as a web-designer for more than 10 years, and I was sick and tired of it. But it was the only thing that I could do professionally. It’s very scary to change everything in your life. I didn't dare to learn a new trade and become a budding specialist with a low salary again. I chose stability and kept painting as a hobby. But life is such a thing that if you don’t go the way you are to go, it pushes you there. And not always in a favorable way.

In November 2016, I got laid off at my job and was very glad. I considered it to be a sign. I decided to find a job as an illustrator. While I was choosing my own style, compiling my portfolio, my leg started to hurt in the hip joint area. In December the leg hurt very much, I was limping. Then I started to go to the doctors. The job search became secondary.

Now I have to explain how the Russian medical system works. There are many very good doctors. But you have to get through the hell to reach them.

In the clinic, you make an appointment with a doctor 2 weeks in advance. He prescribes tests. You should wait for each test for 2 weeks, then you wait for the result for two weeks too. Then the doctor says that he doesn’t know what is wrong with you, sends you to another doctor. Another doctor orders the other tests or sends you to the third doctor. The third one sends you back to the first one, the first one again to the second one, then to some other doctor. Some doctors or tests are not available in your clinic, so you should go to another clinic. It lasts for months. None of the doctors says what's wrong with you but only sends you to the doctors and orders numerous tests. If you have any pain, no one cares. You get the feeling that the doctors don't want to treat you but just kick you like a football. And only when you are about to die, you will be considered seriously. Only then the doctors tend to look into your tests thoroughly and arrive at a diagnosis. Many people die until they get to this stage. And I'm not kidding, I have relatives and friends who had died before the doctors began to take their disease seriously.

The good thing is that medical care is free for all citizens of Russia.

If you read this book, you will understand that I was lucky to get through this hell. One doctor, the second, the third, MRI, CT, X-rays, constant use of painkillers… One doctor says that everything is fine, the other says that it’s osteoarthritis, the third one says something else. Everyone says that it’s nothing serious, but no one knows why my leg hurts. Thay advised me to go to the swimming pool and to do physical therapy. That was the period of time when I was already taking painkillers every 3 hours. The pain was unbearable. I used to wake up in pain at night, take the painkiller and fall asleep again.

I passed a course of physical therapy for free, then I signed up for trainings at a fitness center, took several individual classes with a good trainer. She made up personal program of physical exercises for me. I did fitness twice a week. I attended an osteopath. I was getting better. I slept all nights without painkillers. But I couldn’t stop limping. I often slipped on the ice, which the osteopath was angry with me at. I was thinking that I was ok and I should do fitness a little bit more, and I would be absolutely fine. But I couldn’t understand why I was limping.

At the end of April, the turning point happened. I went to an artist's store for pastel pencils. And then I entered the subway with the pencils, slipped on the wet floor and fell on my bad leg, on the sickest part. It was an awful pain. Sleepless nights and the painkillers came back. It was even painful to sit. In 3 days I went to a district trauma surgeon. He x-rayed me and told me that the bone was like a sponge. He didn’t understand what it meant but something bad. He wrote a referral to another clinic to visit another trauma surgeon.

Just imagine, how many doctors I had visited until a regular district trauma surgeon that had hundreds of patients a day, accepted me and was the first to discover my serious problem. And he didn’t talk nonsense but honestly admitted that he didn’t understand what the matter was. And he sent me to the other doctor. We stay alive thanks to such doctors.

I went to the other doctor, the other sent me to the third one. The third doctor told me that he didn’t understand it either, but he sent me to an oncologist to exclude any possible risks.

I bought a limping stick and waddled to doctors and tests. These corridors, offices, clinics merged into one flow in my memory. One day I picked up the result of the CT scan. I was getting home in a taxi and reading: suspected cancer. At that moment my world turned upside down. I realized that was reality. I wasn’t going to get by pills, gym and osteopath. I had every chance of dying in a long and painful way. It changed absolutely everything in my life. At that moment i cried but then accepted the situation. Moreover, no one had made an exact diagnosis yet.

I won't bore you with a long list of doctors and tests. I'll just say that after seeing the MRI scan one of them said that it was strange that I was still walking with such a tumor. As a result of visiting various doctors, I ended up in a good hospital where I had a biopsy. To be more accurate, two biopsies: under anesthesia and without anesthesia. First, they put me on my stomach without anesthesia, anesthetized the soft tissues, inserted something like a thick needle and began to peel off a piece of bone. And bone is impossible to anesthetize. I was bawling my head off. The nurse was distracting me, asking questions, telling me something. It was the worst pain I have ever experienced. The second biopsy was much easier: under general anesthesia. They cut my buttock and took a fraction of soft tissues and bone for analysis. Two weeks later, when I recovered from anesthesia, I was let to go home. They said they would call me when the results of the biopsy were ready.