A young woman told by doctors she had “easy” cancer suffered extreme side effects that left her wheelchair-bound and dealing with memory loss that caused her to forget her own dad. Abbie Smith was just 22 years old and halfway through her sports coaching master’s degree when she started to experience back pain.
After experiencing a slew of other symptoms, scans found a “sinister” mass on her chest, and three litres of fluid on her lungs. Days later, she was told she had cancer.
“The only word to describe how I felt is numb,” said Abbie, a masters student from Wiltshire. “I was with my dad at the time and we were both just in utter shock. At the time we thought it was lung cancer so part of me really thought I was going to die. I vaguely remember hugging my dad and saying I wasn’t ready to die.”
Initial Symptoms and Diagnosis
The athletic student, who played cricket and netball, had first been prescribed painkillers when the back pain flared up in April 2023, but became concerned when she noticed she was regularly feeling nauseous. Her doctors put her symptoms down to the side effects of the medication and told her to come off it, while also prescribing her antibiotics for a rash she had developed on her arm.
Abbie visited the doctor six times over three weeks and things escalated when her arm started to swell. She added: “I was actually starting to feel better before we noticed the swelling. As it was a bank holiday, we contacted my GP who advised we first send a photo of my arm to them and after this, they called to say they wanted to see me.”
Abbie was sent by her GP to A&E with a suspected blood clot but after multiple X-rays, blood tests and CT scans, things took a turn. The now-25-year-old said: “It turned out that I had a collapsed lung and had been breathing out of one lung. My fitness worked against me as if I hadn’t been so fit, I wouldn’t have been able to cope on one lung and it would have been noticed sooner.”
Cancer Diagnosis and Treatment
Abbie said: “Hearing that I had been breathing from only one lung was insane to me. I was told if I hadn’t been so physically fit, I would have noticed I was more unwell sooner than I did - it was crazy hearing these words. Hearing the word sinister which was then explained to mean cancer was such a numb feeling.”
A couple of days later, Abbie was told that she had Acute Lymphoblastic Lymphoma (ALL) cancer. Abbie said: “It was a whirlwind of emotions for a good few days until we found out it wasn’t lung cancer and was in fact a very treatable and curable cancer. I hadn’t heard of lymphoma before. They [doctors] said: ‘If you’re going to get cancer, this is the best one to get’. I think that they were trying to be reassuring, but it wasn’t helpful.
“It makes people think that lymphoma is ‘the easy cancer’ and people who have never experienced it don’t understand it or realise how hard it is. I was also told that I’d need to have two-and-a-half years of treatment – so what’s easy about that?”
Abbie was given steroids to start her cancer treatment, but her kidneys started to shut down and she was sent to the ICU. Her parents, who stayed with her every day during treatment, were told that her kidneys may never be fully well again.
But support did come with the Teenage Cancer Trust, where she received age-appropriate specialist cancer care, and says everyone on the unit quickly became her “second family”. Abbie’s treatment included IV intense chemotherapy for nine months, chemotherapy injected into her spine via a lumbar puncture and 21 months of chemotherapy tablets.
Memory Loss and Side Effects
However, Abbie twice had a reaction to a combination of the drugs used, causing her memory to be affected. She said: “The only way I can describe it is like the words I wanted to use had fallen out of my head. I forgot who my dad was – I looked at him and knew that I knew him but the word ‘dad’ was nowhere in my brain. Thankfully the first time it happened I was already an inpatient in hospital so tests were sorted straight away.”
Abbie’s memory issues have thankfully resolved, and were put down to side effects from medication. She finished maintenance treatment in September 2025 and has since returned to her master’s degree, as well as playing sports in ways that suit her, including walking netball and being a Wicket Keeper in cricket. However, Abbie’s mental health suffered as a result of treatment, including from spending 18 months in a wheelchair due to drop foot, the inability to lift the front part of the foot, causing it to drag or slap while walking, caused by a bleed on a nerve in her back.
Campaigning for Better Communication
Abbie says it was the conversations around cancer that impacted her too. She said: “When I got the phone call to say my scans were clear of cancer, they also told me that I also had a large blood clot on my lung. I wish they’d kept that conversation separate. If they told us the great news at a different time, we could have celebrated it properly and I could’ve been even happier about being told I was free of cancer.”
Abbie is now sharing advice as part of Teenage Cancer Trust’s Cancer Conversations campaign, which aims to highlight some of the communication challenges faced by 13–24-year-olds with cancer, as well as their friends and loved ones.
To healthcare professionals, Abbie added: “If it’s possible, deliver the positive news first, rather than the negative. When I was told I had cancer, instead of telling us the aim was to cure it, they just went on about the length of time I’d be in hospital and all the possible complications. I wish they had started the conversation by telling us it was curable to put our minds a little at ease.”
Abbie has also shared her advice to other young people who may be going through a similar situation and worried about cancer conversation. She said: “You are the person who is most in-tune with your body and if something doesn’t feel right then you have the right to say so and tell a medical professional. No question is silly. If you don’t know something, then don’t feel embarrassed to ask.”
