A young newscaster shared the moment she received a ‘terrifying’ phone call that changed her life when she was diagnosed with an extremely rare disease. cancer.
Kirstie Fitzpatrick was just 19 years old when she noticed a painful growing lesion on her elbow that appeared “overnight”.
The strange mark led her to visit several pharmacists and doctors, who told her there was no concern and encouraged her to remove it “for cosmetic purposes.”
“It was tender to the touch, a funny texture and shape, flesh-colored, rough and painful,” the now 27-year-old said.
Kirstie Fitzpatrick, 27, (pictured) was just 19 when she received the ‘scary’ phone call informing her of her diagnosis.
The reporter had it removed shortly before moving from her family’s Orange home to student accommodation at Macquarie University, and received a strange call from her doctor one Saturday morning.
‘[I] he went on with his life for three weeks [after the surgery] and I didn’t think twice…until I got a slightly scary phone call,” he said. 7Life.
‘I couldn’t understand why my doctor was calling me and I thought it was quite strange.
Then he said the word ‘cancer’ and that was the first time I heard my name and the word cancer in the same sentence. At 19.
“It was very, very scary.”
Ms Fitzpatrick was diagnosed with an extremely rare form of skin cancer that to this day has not been identified, and her case progressed over time from pathologists to the head of pathology at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney.
“No one knew how to identify this,” he added.
The then 19-year-old (pictured) put her studies on the back burner and returned home to Orange to be with her family while she underwent treatment for her mysterious melanoma.
“As a result, it was classified as an aggressive form of melanoma, but to this day, they still don’t know exactly what it was or what caused it.”
The reporter returned to live with her parents in Orange before beginning treatment.
“And that was university in Sydney done and dusted off for me, and I started the process of figuring out what my next steps were,” he said.
She said it was “quite intense”, with many hours traveling back and forth to see her oncologist in Sydney for appointments.
“It’s that feeling of the unknown, just having no idea what this means,” he added.
‘What this was going to do for my life. What this meant to me.
To have the cancer cells removed, Ms Fitzpatrick underwent “major and invasive surgery” in which lymph nodes and cancer cells were removed, leaving her unable to move her arm for six weeks.
Ms Fitzpatrick (pictured) had to relearn how to drive, shower and bend her arm after her ‘major and invasive’ surgery to remove her lymph nodes and cancer cells.
Then he had to relearn how to drive, shower, and bend his elbow.
“Within a couple of weeks, I received the results saying that the cancer was localized to that area,” he said.
“So there was no spread to the lymphatic system or to the blood, so they isolated him during that surgery, which was good news.”
Ms Fitzpatrick is now an ambassador for Skin Cancer College Australasia and encourages others to check their skin regularly.
‘Anything that might be sore, scaly, bleeding, tender, changing shape, size or colour. Is it abnormal? Do you feel different? she added.
“If you notice something that’s different, find a licensed skin cancer professional so they can do a full-body skin check to make sure there’s nothing concerning.”
The reporter (pictured) believes her experience gave her the ‘push’ to start studying journalism, something she always wanted to be.
Now, nearly a decade later, he has undergone two more operations to remove potentially cancerous cells he found during regular self-checks.
“It has been, and still is, a big part of my life,” he says.
She believes her experience gave her the ‘push’ she needed to begin her journalism studies, enrolling at Charles Sturt University after her major surgery.
“If this hadn’t happened to me, I wouldn’t be a journalist,” he revealed.
‘I always wanted to be a journalist. I have always wanted to tell stories.