Joely McNamara used to choose her gym kit by how well the straps covered her back. Last month she stood in a Florida water park in a thin-strapped bikini and took a picture of herself.
The 34-year-old mental health counsellor from Bridgend had spent years hiding a harmless fatty lump, a lipoma, which had grown under her bra line until it measured eight centimetres.
She says it never made her unwell, but it wore her down. “It wasn’t making me ill, but it was affecting my confidence every single day.”
The clothes changed first
She first caught sight of it in the mirror while getting dressed several years ago, when it was around two inches across.
As it grew it settled directly beneath her bra strap, and her wardrobe started rearranging itself around it.
“I’ve always worn quite fitted clothes, but it got to the point where you could actually see the lump through tight tops,” she says. She began buying looser things instead.
The gym and the sauna were harder to work around. She picked bikinis and sports bras with the thickest straps she could find, and started going at quieter times.
That one stung, she says, because she spends her working life telling other people how much exercise and downtime matter. “But every time I went, I was reminded the lump was there.”
Told she would have to live with it
She waited about a year for an ultrasound. When the results came back, she says she was told the lump was benign and would not be removed, because it was not causing a medical problem.
“I just felt defeated,” she says. “I’d waited all that time thinking I’d finally get the result I wanted, only to be told it was something I’d just have to live with.”
She decided to pay for it herself at Nuffield Health Cardiff and Vale Hospital. Her workplace health insurance covered the initial consultation and the surgery came out of her savings.
What changed, she says, was being taken seriously. “After everything I’d been told before, I’d almost convinced myself this was something I just had to put up with. Then suddenly someone was saying, ‘Of course we can help you. It must be uncomfortable. We do this all the time.'”
A ten-day recovery that took two
The lipoma came out in July, a day case under general anaesthetic. She was told to expect around ten days of recovery and says she barely noticed it after the first two.
She had been nervous about swapping the lump for a scar. “The first time I saw my back after the dressing came off, I couldn’t believe how neat the scar looked.”
The clothes she actually wanted
Weeks later she flew to Florida. “I bought strappy dresses, halter-neck tops and bikinis that I would never have worn before.”
Looking back, she says saving for the surgery was one of the better decisions she has made.
“It wasn’t about vanity,” she says. “It was about feeling comfortable in my own body again.”
Most lumps turn out to be nothing. But as Swansea Bay surgeon Thomas Bragg put it in July, after a Maesteg man had a rare cancer taken out of his shoulder, anything growing quickly, bigger than five centimetres, deep or painful is worth showing a GP.
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