Ursula Martin walked thousands of miles around Wales after treatment for cancer
- by Target Ovarian Cancer
- •
- 12 Mar, 2018
Four years after diagnosis Ursula is walking 3,300 miles around Wales
Ursula Martin was 31 and house sitting in Bulgaria when she was diagnosed with stage 1A ovarian cancer during a Christmas visit home. In early 2014, the now 35-year-old decided to walk nearly 4,000 miles around Wales in between hospital appointments as a way of seeing if she could get back to who she was before her diagnosis. Ursula’s journey took her across, around, up, over and through all of Wales, as she walked over 3,700 miles, raising money and awareness of the symptoms of ovarian cancer. Now she has written a book about her experiences, One Woman Walks Wales.
My diagnosis came as a complete surprise. Not only was I relatively fit; I was relatively young too, which meant I didn’t recognise what was happening in my body.
I’d been having abdominal pain for a while and I felt like there was something in my belly. I just thought I was having some sort of weird period pain. I came back to the UK for a Christmas visit and mentioned to a few family members that I didn’t feel like I could bend properly; it felt like there was something in the way.
I went see the doctor and he said he thought I had a large ovarian cyst. I had a scan which showed I had a growth and they said the blood tests were showing it was a type of tumour. I ended up having abdominal surgery about three weeks later. At that point they told me I had stage 1A ovarian cancer: it was a very large tumour but I was really lucky because it was contained within a cyst-like growth, which meant it hadn’t had the chance to spread.
Read the book - One Woman Walks Wales
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