By Emily Stearn, health journalist for Mailonline
2:13 p.m. June 20, 2024, updated 2:45 p.m. June 20, 2024
A mother-of-two was diagnosed with an incurable blood cancer just months after her GP told her her debilitating back pain was probably just muscle pain.
Jane Hogan, from Cheshunt in Hertfordshire, was at one point unable to move due to her condition, leaving her in paralyzing agony.
Despite a visit to her family doctor in 2019 who prescribed morphine, a powerful painkiller, she still felt “horrible” pain.
This led to the now 58-year-old being rushed to hospital in late February 2020, where doctors discovered her back was actually fractured in 12 places.
But it wasn’t until he returned to the emergency room a week later in March in excruciating pain that the true cause of his pain was revealed.
Tests later revealed that she had myeloma, a blood cancer that arises from bone marrow plasma cells, the “spongy” substance inside our bones.
Recalling her heartbreaking diagnosis, Ms Hogan said: “My first thought was: I have to tell my children. I have to tell them I have cancer.
“Then it was, ‘Am I going to die?’ »
“The doctors just said, ‘We’ll sort out your treatment plan. It’s not curable, but it’s definitely treatable.’
She added: “I hope I’ll be the one who’s 10 years old (after diagnosis). I still have too much to do, I can’t go anywhere yet.
“My daughter is about to buy her first property, I need to get her in and get her married. I still have a lot to do, so it won’t beat me.
There are around 6,000 new cases of myeloma per year in the UK, with more than 35,000 in the US.
This happens due to changes in the DNA of plasma cells, which turn them into abnormal myeloma cells, which replicate more quickly and cause a host of problems.
It is often called multiple myeloma because it can be found in several places, wherever bone marrow is found.
But the symptoms of the disease – including back pain, broken bones, fatigue and recurrent infections – often go unnoticed and are instead linked to general aging or minor ailments and injuries.
Although chemotherapy can reduce the number of myeloma cells, doctors are not yet able to completely eradicate them.
CAR-T cell therapy is available on the NHS for some cancer patients – usually children and young people with certain types of leukemia and adults with some forms of lymphoma – but not yet for myeloma.
After seeing her GP, Ms Hogan said her back pain was “off the Richter scale”, leaving her unable to walk and get into her car without assistance.
“I’m hard. I’m a single mom, I raised two kids, I had a full-time job, a good social life – it hit me for six years,” she added.
“I took time off work, which I never do, and had to sit in a lawn chair. I couldn’t even sit on my couch, it was horrible.
After going to hospital by ambulance in February 2020, Ms Hogan claimed doctors “asked me if I had been in a car accident or if I had fallen down the stairs or if I had been attacked because I had several fractures.”
But a week later, “I woke up that day and thought, ‘I’m going to die today,'” she said.
In the emergency room, a young doctor reviewed his previous test results and immediately suspected myeloma. Tests confirmed she had the illness in March 2020, seven months after her symptoms began.
Ms Hogan immediately started chemotherapy, but due to Covid lockdowns she was forced to continue her treatment at home with tablets and blood thinners.
She underwent a stem cell transplant in December 2020, but in fall 2021 she was told she needed to start chemotherapy again.
Ms. Hogan is still undergoing treatment and undergoing physiotherapy. She also claims her condition caused her to lose 3 inches in height, leaving her 5 feet 3 inches tall.
Even though her back pain “will never go away,” she says she is determined to “make a life for herself.”
She is now urging other Britons who may be suffering from similarly mysterious symptoms to “stand up for themselves” and get any unusual symptoms checked out as soon as possible if they think something is wrong.
“Until I got it, I had no idea about myeloma… there were so many red flags that I didn’t understand.
“Don’t keep letting things go. If there is a problem, see your doctor.
Her family has been “brilliant” in supporting her, she added, and her friends “have become a pride of lionesses”.
She believes she “wouldn’t be here without them” and her two children – Tillie, 26, and Charlie, 32.
“You just have to be grateful every day when you wake up…I try not to worry about the little things anymore,” she said.
“Get up every day and breathe. Go to the garden if you can, go for a walk, go for a drive, go for a hamburger if that’s what you feel like.
“The NHS keeps me alive, so for that I will be forever grateful.”
Ms Hogan is one of a growing number of Britons who are only told they have cancer in emergency rooms.
New figures suggest more than 100,000 patients have been diagnosed with cancer in emergency departments over the past five years.
Experts warn that people treated in this way are often in the later stages of the disease, when it is more expensive and more difficult to treat and the chances of survival are lower.
It comes against a backdrop of record dissatisfaction with GPs and long waits for diagnostic tests, with patients often struggling to be seen.
Cancer Research UK described the situation as “unacceptable” and warned it could impact patients’ chances of beating the disease.
Meanwhile, the Catch Up With Cancer campaign said late diagnoses in emergency rooms are a “surefire sign that our national approach to cancer is simply not working”.