Woman who ‘knew something was not right’ in remission after diagnosis

A young mother-of-two astonished medics after her ‘incurable’ cancer is in remission thanks to a new £250,000 treatment that was recently made available on the NHS.

Lauren Boyle, 35, feared the worst when she was told the harrowing news there were no options available to cure her stage four Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, which was diagnosed in January 2022 after weeks of back pain, reports the Daily Record.

The former NHS worker was told the aggressive cancer had spread to her blood, bones and kidneys. Medical staff warned her nothing more could be done until she was offered a new miracle life-saving stem-cell treatment, CAR-T, which had recently been made available on the NHS.

The treatment saw stem cells extracted from Lauren and grown in a lab in the Netherlands.

She said: “It’s been a miracle. My consultant is just so amazed by my progress. Things were looking very bleak in December, I was being told that there was nothing they could do and that it was incurable.

“One of my consultants flagged up this treatment and put me forward for it. They sent eight of the stem cells to a lab in Amsterdam, it really is amazing. It just shows that there is hope for people.”

The brave mum, from Tarbolton, spent a month in hospital as the treatment left her without a working immune system.

She said: “It was really hard but I got there, I had to spend four weeks in a room and wasn’t able to leave at all. I was an emotional wreck by the end of it, I was losing the will to live.

‌“The room was in the Queen Elizabeth University Hospital, at one point they feared that I’d have to go to Newcastle. It could have been Newcastle for all I knew it literally felt like 1,000 miles from home.”

Lauren has praised the NHS for giving her access to the costly treatment, with her consultant pushing for the stem cell option, and is now setting her sights on getting back to work after two years away.

She added: “I actually cannot wait to get back to work, I know I just need to try and rebuild and get back to normality.”