A Lewisham teacher who thought she simply had a lingering cough after Covid has told how it turned out to be a rare chest cancer — and how, five years on, she is now cancer free and supporting the hospital that treated her.
Michaela Riley was 34 when she caught coronavirus in February 2021, with a cough that refused to shift. When she was still experiencing symptoms 19 days later, and in excruciating pain, her mum told her to go to A&E.
After several scans, she received the devastating news that she had stage three thymoma cancer, a rare type of cancer of the thymus gland in the chest. Following an x-ray, ECG, CT scan, MRI, biopsy and PET scan, she was told it was a 6.4cm thymoma.
“I’d had Covid, but there was this lingering cough that wasn’t going. Every time I laid on my back I felt like I was drowning. Like my lung was filling up with water,” she said.
Her son was just eight at the time. She said it really hit her when she got home after numerous investigative appointments at the hospital, when her son came running towards her after school and she could not hug him because of the PET scan guidance.
“My mum screamed out, ‘No! You can’t hug mummy yet’. For the first time I realised there may be a point where my son would never hug me again,” she said.
She asked to be referred to Guy’s because she had received treatment there for meningitis at age 11. Because of her age at the time of diagnosis, she was offered egg freezing treatment at Guy’s Assisted Conception Unit before treatment began. She then underwent 21 rounds of chemotherapy to shrink the tumour before a complex five-hour surgery.
“Chemo is very tough. You walk in there ready to go and you are absolutely fine, but once treatment starts to take affect you can barely walk out. My rounds were eight hours long, so I was often the first in and the last out,” she said. “I was a baby by the end of it.”
Her dad would come upstairs, pick her up and carry her to the car. “You go from being fiercely independent to needing your parents, or whoever is there, to care for you,” she said. “I needed someone to parent me and parent my child. Mentally that was a struggle.”
In September 2021, consultant thoracic surgeon Professor Andrea Bille led the specialist surgical team who operated on Michaela at Guy’s. The procedure is complex because of the closeness of the thymus gland to vital organs, including the heart and major blood vessels. Professor Bille cut open Michaela’s chest to carefully remove the thymoma and part of the thyroid.
The cancer was in a major vein called the superior vena cava, which carries deoxygenated blood from the upper part of the body to the heart. It was crucial to reconstruct the vein and part of the pericardium, the protective lining that surrounds the heart.
Thymoma is a cancer of the thymus, a small gland in the chest that plays a part in the immune system. Around 380 people are diagnosed with thymus gland cancer in the UK each year, the majority of whom have thymomas, according to Guy’s Hospital. Most thoracic surgeons may encounter a case like Michaela’s once a year or even less often, Professor Bille said — but Guy’s sees around one a month, because it set up a specialist service for the condition.
“Michaela has made a full recovery and now she’s five years cancer free,” Professor Bille said. “If you can perform these surgeries as safe as you can, you can offer these young patients the best outcomes possible. She can have a normal life, have a family and babies and enjoy her life.”
Michaela has a check-up and scans every year, and since her treatment she has had a daughter, without needing fertility treatment, who is almost two. Her son is now 13.
This year, the Cancer Centre at Guy’s is marking 10 years since it opened its doors to patients, and Michaela is supporting it for the care she received. “From beginning to end there was no stone unturned. Every time we spoke to somebody it felt like it was very personal. Like they really cared,” she said.
“Life has looked up ever since. Having cancer and surviving it has given me the chance to start again.”
It is one of several community health stories from across the capital in recent weeks, from Lewisham residents training as citizen scientists to help retrofit homes to a Sutton venue opening its doors on Christmas Day for anyone alone or struggling.
Image: Guy’s Hospital courtyard (library photo, Wikimedia Commons).
