Who I am fundraising for and why

So, The Cancer Treatment and Research Trust. This the charity I am fundraising for and a charity very close to my heart. On 14 January 2012 I was diagnosed with a complete molar pregnancy and that is where the story begins.

If you Google The Cancer Treatment and Research Trust you get to this site. However, the section I am fundraising for specifically is not on that site. This site is the research trust I'm talking about.

There is a very small department at Charing Cross hospital called the Hmole-Chorio department. This is where they research and treat something called Gestational Trophoblastic Disease. This is also known as hydatidiform mole or molar pregnancy. This is a very rare complication of pregnancy and the site I've just linked to will give you better information about molar pregnancy.

In short, an egg is fertilised but the process goes wrong and the placenta part of the pregnancy, the trophoblast, grows very quickly but no foetus grows, or a foetus with very wrong DNA is formed. This is called the hydatidiform mole and it is a type of tumour. This grows very quickly and produces a lot of HCG hormone, the hormone that gives you a positive pregnancy test, producing all the common symptoms of a pregnancy, but with no foetus there. Women who have a molar pregnancy often have extreme symptoms of pregnancy including sickness and tiredness due to very high HCG levels. Very sadly, this is often only discovered at ultrasound scan and the "products of conception" must be evacuated surgically.

After the evacuation, women should be referred to one of three regional centres for follow-up. Charing Cross Hospital is the largest centre and a world leader in this area of research. The others are in Sheffield and Dundee. Follow-up involves taking fortnightly samples of a woman's blood and urine to ensure that her HCG levels are dropping. The molar tissue can take some time to die away and the HCG, the hormone that the tumour produces, should drop accordingly. This is the first stage of follow-up. If the HCG hormone level stays the same or rises consistently for two weeks, or there are other problems during follow-up, this means a choriocarcinoma has formed and treatment must then begin.

A choriocarcinoma is a type of cancer which needs to be treated with chemotherapy. This happens in about 10% of cases of molar pregnancy. Luckily, it is 100% curable but the cancer can be very difficult to get rid of.

Once the molar tissue is gone, whether naturally or with treatment, there is further monthly follow-up testing only the woman's urine to ensure that the molar tissue is entirely gone. Throughout all follow-up, it is advised that women do not get pregnant again as any remaining molar tissue can affect a new pregnancy, starting the process again.

Unfortunately, at present, there is no way of knowing, once a molar pregnancy is diagnosed, whether or not it will cause cancer. All that can be done is to be tested and wait and see what happens. This can be agonising and emotionally draining for many weeks and months.

The research that I am fundraising for aims to change this. The team at Charing Cross are hoping to develop a test that will find out whether a mole is persistent or not at the point of diagnosis, saving women and their families potentially months of worry and heartbreak waiting for results. It would have made such a difference in the difficult time after my diagnosis to know that after everything I had been through - miscarriage, surgery, recovery - that I was lucky, I did not need treatment. It would have been fantastic if it hadn't taken four months to learn that and I hope that very soon the research will be done which means that other women won't have to go through that horrible wait.