Ciara Mageean

At that moment in time, there was no plan.

You're given your diagnosis and I'm just looking to...

get in touch with the oncologist and figure that out.

And equally, they take a sample off the cancer.

So they took a sample.

They send it off for testing because they need to find out if it's genetic or non-genetic.

They need to find...

I'm not an oncologist, so I won't be able to tell you all the ins and outs, but they need to find what's the most appropriate treatment for it.

And until those tests come back, you can't begin treatment because you need to be given the relevant one.

So it began the referral pathway of me accessing the health care up at home.

And people can say what they like about the NHS.

Waiting lists are very long.

But whenever it comes to accessing cancer care, they're phenomenally fast.

So the ball got rolling very quickly.

And I had scans, had MRI scans, CT scans and a PET scan.

PET scans were radioactive, like sugars are put into your body.

They quickly attach to the cancer cells because they're the most chronic.

quickly using sugar in the simplest terms that I can have because they have a high metabolism.

And so whenever I got called back into my colorectal surgeon's office to give me the stage of my cancer, they had accessed all of that information, the scans and the genetic testing.

And sitting there, I was sitting in that room with me, Thomas and my big sister, Myra, came with me.