Falkirk woman diagnosed with blood cancer after back pain speaks out to raise awareness

dailyrecord.co.uk:

A Falkirk woman is calling for more awareness of blood cancer after receiving a devastating diagnosis during lockdown. Sarah Barron, 48, was told that she had Myeloma back in 2020.The yoga teacher had squatted down to feed her cat and felt something pop in her back, followed by agonising pain.She was rushed to hospital where medics found a fluid-filled tumour had crushed one of her vertebrae.She was diagnosed with Myeloma, a type of blood cancer, that develops from cells in the bone marrow called plasma cells.Sarah was in such severe agony she couldn't stand and had to crawl to the living room and shout for help following the incident.She said: "I couldn't move so I crawled to the living room, shouted and eventually a relative heard me and I was taken away in an ambulance to the hospital."It was the worst pain I've ever felt in my life.She had been experiencing increasingly debilitating lower back pain for over six weeks but thought nothing of it until her diagnosis."I had a tumour pressing on my vertebrae," she continued."I had not heard of myeloma."Prior to all this my mum had died of cancer in the January - we had had a pretty bad run of things."There's no cure for my cancer, they can only control it.

It's difficult."Initially I wasn't able to get around because of my fractured vertebrae but exercising after my first stem cell transplant has helped."Looking back, Sarah thinks she may have had symptoms for a decade, including night sweats which started when she was just 37.Sarah received her first stem cell transplant in July 2021.She added: "With stem cell transplants your immune system goes back to nothing so I've not been really seeing people.Falkirk Live brings you the latest headlines from Falkirk and beyond.But