Jodie Wheldon loved GAA: in the summer of 2020, she was 16 years old and constantly training and playing.
She began to feel pain in her knee, and eventually the pain got so bad she could no longer walk, despite wearing a brace to compensate for the injury.
“I was in a lot of pain. My dad took me to VHI straight away. They examined me, put me in a different kind of knee brace and told me to come back after a week if there was no change,” she said.
“I went back to the hospital, booked an MRI, had the scan and then got a call saying they had a tumour.”
Two weeks later, she was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer.
“I was feeling a lot of emotions and trying to come to terms with things. When I found out I thought, why me? Why now? I tried to understand why. It was a cancer I’d never heard of and hearing the names of famous people I didn’t even know existed and it made me wonder why it happened to me,” she said.
Speaking during Sarcoma Awareness Month, Professor Alan Molloy, consultant orthopaedic surgeon at Kapa National Orthopaedic Hospital, said sarcoma was a very rare form of cancer.
“Sarcoma is ultimately a cancer that can arise from any soft tissue, which means that any cell type can develop into a sarcoma,” he said.
“That’s why it’s uncommon. It occurs mostly in the legs and arms, but it can occur in the stomach or anywhere because there are fat cells and muscle there. It can occur in the chest, head, neck, anywhere.”
Regarding osteosarcoma, Professor Molloy said when talking about bone cancer it generally refers to cancer that has “metastasized to the bone from the breast, prostate, lung or kidney”.
“Osteosarcoma, on the other hand, begins in the bone. It’s a difficult disease to diagnose very early on, because it affects a high percentage of children and teenagers. They’re out and about, playing a sport, they get a bruise and they think that’s it. They don’t recover from that injury, and when they get tested, their world is completely changed.”
Professor Molloy said around 280 cases of sarcoma are diagnosed in Ireland each year and the five-year survival rate for localised cancer that has not spread to other parts of the body is around 75 per cent. Of those 280 cases of sarcoma, around 40 to 50 are osteosarcoma.
After her diagnosis, Weldon, now 20, underwent chemotherapy and surgery, but what came as most of a surprise to her was the need for fertility treatment.
“One of the side effects of the chemotherapy I was having was that it affected my fertility. I was very young. [fertility treatment]It’s a long process, with daily injections and constant ultrasounds. That was the first time it felt real to me.” She said:
Although the year was incredibly difficult, Weldon has now been cancer-free for almost three years and has just completed her first year of early childhood education at Maynooth University.
She said she could not have done it without the support of friends and family, Arklow Cancer Support and medical staff at St Vincent’s and Capagh Hospitals.
“I’m kind of back where I wanted to be. There are some things I’ll never be able to do again, like Gaelic football and contact sports,” she said.
“I felt such an honor just to be able to walk again. To be able to go outside and be myself again. I told myself that if I could walk again, I would be willing to make that sacrifice.”
