成人快手 Scotland - 成人快手 Scotland - 鈥淚鈥檝e got it, I鈥檒l deal with it and each day gets easier and easier鈥� 鈥� an inspiring story about living with cancer in your 20s

鈥淚鈥檝e got it, I鈥檒l deal with it and each day gets easier and easier鈥� 鈥� an inspiring story about living with cancer in your 20s

25 April 2018

By the time Jasmin Smith was diagnosed with breast cancer, at 24 years old, it had already spread to her spine and the lymph node in her chest.

Jasmin Smith

Her type of cancer feeds off the oestrogen hormone, so she’s treated with targeted hormone therapy. She takes a combination of pills and injections which stop her body from producing oestrogen — and this stops her cancer from growing or spreading.

“It’s really hard to describe what it’s like living with cancer,” explained Jasmin in 成人快手 One Scotland’s The Cancer Hospital.

“It’s like I went to sleep one day and then woke up in this whole other place and everything’s so different and I’m tired all the time and I’m sore and I’m worried and I’m all these horrible negative emotions. I don’t want to think about it, but I think about it all the time.

“It’s like there’s this little part of you that’s angry and sad — and there’s not enough laughter in the world that can get rid of it.

“There’s this tiny little bit of darkness that creeps in. Sometimes it can take over your whole day and sometimes it just stays that teeny, tiny bit of darkness, but there’s always that niggly little bit that holds you back in life. You just have to deal with it. That’s what I tell myself. I’ve got it, I’ll deal with it and each day gets easier and easier.”

Because of improvements in recognising different types of breast cancer, some targeted therapies like Jasmin’s can be taken for decades.

Dr Iain Macpherson, Consultant Medical Oncologist at The Beatson Cancer Centre in Glasgow, described those improvements as “One of the biggest changes I’ve seen over the past 15-20 years. If you understand the different types of cancer better, then you can target the treatment much more accurately to that particular type.”

Jasmin is scanned every four months to make sure her treatment is still working and the cancer remains under control.

“They scan your chest, abdomen, bladder, armpits — and then I’m getting a head CT as well (a computer-processed combination of X-ray scans) which I’ve requested because I was getting headaches and feeling a bit dizzy. They’ve never checked my head...”