A FERNHILL HEALTH mum’s troublesome ‘verruca’ which turned out to be cancer, is joining forces with her sons to make a stand against the disease.
Sporting loud orange and black striped socks and an orange tutu, Rachel Solvason is kicking back at the disease whuch left a ‘gaping hole’ in her foot.
The 40-year-old works as an administrator at the Haresfield GP surgery on Newtown Road and hopes her efforts will see fund-raisers across the city and beyond collect the cash for Stand Up To Cancer, a joint campaign this October from Cancer Research UK and Channel 4.
Rachel was diagnosed with malignant melanoma in January 2017, six months after first noticing the sore spot on her foot.
“I felt what I thought was a piece of glass stuck in the bottom of my foot,” said Rachel, who lives in Fernhill Heath with husband Rick and two of her sons Josh Smallman, 20 and Ciaran Anderson, 15. She also has another son, Lewis Smallman, 22.
“Eventually it grew into what looked like a verruca. I treated it with over-the-counter cream but nothing seemed to work. Everyone I showed it to thought it was a verruca too, but by Christmas it had become the size of a penny and was quite sore to walk on.”
Rachel’s GP agreed it looked like a verruca, but a swab showed no evidence of the verruca virus so Rachel was referred to Kidderminster Hospital for a biopsy.
“In early January 2017 I was called back into the clinic in Worcester where I was told it was malignant melanoma,” said Rachel.
She referred to the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham where she had further surgery to make sure all the cancer was removed. So much of her foot was taken away she had to have plastic surgery to replace part of her heel with a filler.
Test results suggested the cancer had not spread, but in November 2017 Rachel noticed a lump in her groin.
“They thought it was just a cyst and I was told to enjoy my Christmas, but then the biopsy results came back and showed the lump in my groin was in fact melanoma. I was devastated,” said Rachel.
In January Rachel had all her lymph nodes removed at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Birmingham, but last summer noticed a lump in her groin, in the same place. Yet again, the lump turned out to be melanoma.
CT and MRI scans also revealed a few nodules of cancer in Rachel’s lung, and later it was discovered in her stomach lining.
The tumour in her stomach was removed, but surgery on her lung was impossible, so Rachel began a course of immunotherapy.
After months of immunotherapy Rachel is currently cancer free and is back at work full-time, though she still has treatment every four weeks as the melanoma is likely to recur.
Last October she bared her many scars on Facebook in support of Stand Up To Cancer, and this year she is determined to back the campaign again.
“I’m a feisty person – I’ve had to be – and it gives me great pleasure to kick back at cancer by jazzing up my damaged foot and joining the Stand Up To Cancer campaign,” she said.
Jane Redman, Cancer Research UK’s spokesperson for the West Midlands, said: “We are very grateful to Rachel, Josh and Ciaran for helping to raise awareness with such panache. There’s been amazing progress in the past few decades and more people are now surviving cancer than ever before.
Since it was launched in the UK in 2012, Stand Up To Cancer has raised more than £62million to fund 52 pioneering clinical trials and research projects.
Visit www.su2c.org.uk for more.
