A mother-of-six who felt like her leg “was stuck in mud” has spoken of her shock after being told it was a sign of incurable blood cancer . Sophia Hulse, from Willenhall, in Walsall, had felt like her “bones were being squeezed in a device” for weeks when she was finally diagnosed with myeloma in January – after being initially told she’d just pulled a muscle. She was 40.
By the time her cancer was caught, she couldn’t move her right leg and her back was broken. She also had holes, known as lesions, in her hip and spine. “I felt like my bones were being squeezed in a device,” she said.
“I couldn’t physically move my right leg. I felt like I was stuck in the mud. I would drag it everywhere behind me.
I would say to my brain, ‘Move your right leg,’ but nothing happened.” Sophia, now 41, knew something was wrong when she started experiencing back and shoulder ache in November last year. Before long she was struggling to lie down in bed.
Things came to a head after Christmas, when she tried to walk up the stairs but her right leg refused to move. “I would have to lift my right leg to go in the car and get out of the car,” she said. “I would have to pick up my right leg and lift it up the stairs.
I went to the GP three times in one week but they didn’t think much of it. They said it was a pulled muscle but it felt like something more than that.” Eventually she woke up one Sunday morning unable to move.
She called 999 and was rushed to hospital.
