'I ignored vertigo and hot flushes - then a visit to the GP left me reeling'

manchestereveningnews.co.uk:

When Barbara Geraghty-Whitehead first started experiencing a 'dizzy vertigo feeling' during the first coronavirus lockdown, she put it to the back of her mind.

She had been a healthy and active woman who enjoyed travelling abroad, walking her dogs, and going out for meals with her family.

When she began experiencing regular hot flushes on top of symptoms of dizziness, she just put it down to the warm, balmy weather at the time and 'thought no more of it.' But as her symptoms persisted and eventually, after months of hesitation, she decided to address the niggling feeling that something wasn't right and visited her GP. Try MEN Premium for FREE by clicking here for no ads, fun puzzles and brilliant new features Within a matter of hours, Barbara, who lives in Cheshire, received a phone call from her doctor saying: "We're concerned about how high your white blood cells are, it could be blood cancer.' Just a week later, after further tests, the mum-of-two received the devastating news that she had chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) and that it's incurable. "You say you want to carry on as much as normal, but from that second nothing else was going to be normal anymore," she told PA Real Life. "I wanted to go in and for them to say, 'No, it was a mistake, it’s something else,' but they didn’t, they said it was CML." Barbara started taking chemotherapy tablets that same day – and despite experiencing side-effects of fatigue, nausea, acid reflux, and a loss of taste, nearly one year later she has responded well to treatment and has been able to see her daughter get married in Cyprus, which was "brilliant." After nearly ignoring her own symptoms, she wants to encourage others not to “make excuses”, as “people need to know