I thought melanoma was just a mole but now I have tumours on my heart and I won’t see my daughter grow up. This is the one ‘slight’ symptom that I shouldn’t have ignored…

Victoria Hudson-Craig was just 33 when she noticed a strange mole on her shoulder – but several doctors thought nothing of it.

The mole changed shape a few times – and alarm bells started ringing in May 2013 when it began to bleed down Victoria’s back.

Fast-forward 11 years, and Victoria now has five tumours on her heart. 

Tragically, doctors have told Victoria that her rare form of melanoma is incurable.  

The young mum told FEMAIL she was ‘terrified’ of her six-year-old daughter growing up without her and that she never imagined a small mole and irregular heart palpitations were the only symptoms of what was to come. 

‘I was on holiday with my sister and she noticed the mole bleeding,’ Victoria said.

‘I went back to another doctor again who told me I needed to have it removed immediately – which was the polar opposite of all medical advice I’d received before.’

The following month, the mole was removed and formally diagnosed to be stage 2b melanoma.

‘I was shocked at first – I hadn’t really heard much about it, growing up in the UK. It wasn’t a commonly-known cancer to me,’ Victoria said.

Doctors made further excisions into Victoria’s back and left shoulder to check if the illness had spread to surrounding tissue, but nothing was found at the time.

‘They told me it could still be in my bloodstream and undetectable. But there was nothing else to be done in the moment,’ Victoria said.

In 2015, Victoria moved to New Zealand and eventually gave birth to her daughter, Ruby, in 2017.

‘The original melanoma in 2013 sent me to a dark place,’ she said. 

‘I moved to New Zealand to have a break from life and reevaluate what was important to me.

‘I met my husband six months later and ended up staying here, and I’ve tried to live in the moment more. I’m very aware that time is short.’

Victoria felt a sharp pain in her abdomen in October 2020 and was rushed to the hospital with appendicitis.

‘As the hospital was prepping me to have my appendix removed, they did a scan to check that it was indeed my appendix causing pain.

‘The radiologist’s hand slipped and accidentally scanned the bottom of my heart – where two tumours were visible.’

Victoria recalled the doctor’s wide-eyed expression.

Several tests later, the mum was diagnosed with four tumours on her heart – three around the bottom of the muscle, and one in the middle.

‘They thought the melanoma had come back, but it didn’t look very much like melanoma. Doctors said it looked unusual and they couldn’t really identify it.’

After the inconclusive findings, doctors sent Victoria’s test results to foreign colleagues with the hope someone would be able to diagnose her.

Papworth Hospital in the UK did an analysis that showed it was more likely than anything else that the tumours were a result of melanoma.  

‘I was then treated for stage 4 melanoma and started immunotherapy for nine months – but it proved ineffective.’

Victoria was stunned by the diagnosis – especially considering she had no other obvious symptoms.

The mum recalled slight heart palpitations, but she was also going through early menopause at the time, and believed it was due to her hormonal changes.

‘The cancer was progressing and doctors also found a fifth tumour in my heart in December 2021. The week before Christmas, doctors told me all the five tumours had grown and the biggest one was 6cm.’

Victoria had to find alternative treatments when she realised the immunotherapy had no hope of working.

She started on BRAF inhibitor drugs and paid for it out of pocket because the medicine was not funded by the government.

Four months later, a miracle occurred: Victoria’s tumours had shrunk by 30 per cent, with the following months showing a similar pattern of shrinkage.

However, the medication has impacted Victoria’s quality of life and caused severe health anxiety – with even a mere stomach bug needing to be checked out by her doctor.

‘There’s always the chance that it isn’t just something I ate but the cancer and other symptoms are being masked by the pills,’ she said.

She also regularly suffered through high fevers and fatigue where she couldn’t even get out of bed for days at a time.

Something that helps Victoria get through every day is to try to see life through her daughter’s eyes.

‘She knows there’s something wrong with my heart, and that I take medication for it. But she doesn’t understand that it’s cancer or what that means. She doesn’t know that it’s incurable.

‘We try to tell her what we feel she can take on without creating too much anxiety.’

Victoria’s main goal is to spend as much time as possible with her family while she still can, creating positive memories and experiences for her young daughter.

‘The future is so uncertain, and one of the things that breaks my heart the most is knowing that she will grow up without me.

‘I hope we have a long time together, but it frightens me that it’ll come to an end before I’m ready.’

Victoria said her husband, Ryan, has been her rock throughout her health journey thanks to his calm and kind demeanour.

‘It’s terrifying for him, too, knowing he’s going to be a single father at some point. I don’t know how he copes with it sometimes, but he’s so strong and caring.’

Victoria’s medicine is currently only holding the tumours stable.

Doctors suspect that if Victoria’s tumours continue to grow, they will cause heart failure.

‘I have scans every three months to make sure they’re stable and I need to stay on the medication as long as I can. I’m not sure what we’ll do if it stops working.

‘There’s no mainstream treatment at the moment, so we might have to look for more experimental ones overseas.’

You can donate to the fund to help pay for Victoria’s medication here.