A 72-year-old mother has revealed the early stages of her cancer diagnosis began with her feeling a pain "like nagging toothache".
Margie Shields was diagnosed around 20 years ago with breast cancer, having already watched her mother and her sister battle with the disease.
Since that day, she's undergone over 300 chemotherapy treatments.
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Margie said she "just sensed there was something wrong" when she started feeling pain in her breast, the Liverpool Echo reports.
After taking a trip to the Royal Liverpool Hospital, doctors diagnosed her with breast cancer, and she began a two-decades-long treatment cycle.
Her cancer, which spread to the bones in her chest and shoulder, is incurable and requires lifelong treatment, but she credits constant developments in medicine for keeping her alive.
Initially "petrified", Margie, now 72, found community in that room of chairs arranged in a semi-circle at the Royal, saying: "It was always full of chatter because we sat close together and we could mingle.
"You'd be singing and laughing, and somebody would come in and tell us funny things that had happened to them over the weekend."
Her 88-year-old friend Ann Hannah, from Liverpool, has been by her side through much of this since they met on Margie's first day of treatment at the Linda McCartney Centre
Now Margie and Ann, dubbed the 'Terrible Twins' by their oncologist, schedule their fortnightly chemo at the Clatterbridge Cancer Centre in Liverpool for the same day so they can spend time together.
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