Trust

In August 2020 I was diagnosed with cancer – Myeloma. At the time I was a healthy 48-year-old. I did pilates and yoga, I ran regularly and was pretty happy with where I was in life, having come through a marriage break-up and the loss of my Mum in 2015. The diagnosis was without question the biggest shock of my life. I can remember 20th August 2020 in vivid detail. In the morning my eldest son received his GCSE results; which was, of course, the year that they didn’t actually get to take their exams due to Covid. The additional uncertainty that ensued as a result of that was soon dispelled when he received fabulous results and, of course, made me burst with pride. To be followed by a phone call from my doctor in the afternoon while I was driving home from the park with my youngest son. The nervousness in her voice as she said she would call me back when I was at home as she didn’t want to speak while I was driving even though I was on hands-free. I vividly remember that 10-minute wait at home for the phone to ring to be told that the blood tests they’d been doing to investigate some nose bleeds I’d been having (which I now believe to be unrelated to the cancer diagnosis) indicated that I had Myeloma. She asked me to come down to the surgery so she could talk to me in person and I called my friend to come and be with my children. I remember shaking and crying as my friend hugged me as I conveyed the news to her and I vividly remember the sheer terror and confusion of sitting opposite my doctor as she repeated what she’d told me on the phone to my face at the surgery. How on earth was this possible? I was starting to rebuild my life after my marriage breakdown a couple of years before. I loved my work as a Life Coach and I had three beautiful sons. I had everything to live for. Everything was spinning around me. I had no idea what was up and what was down. What was true and what was imagined. What on earth was going on? My precious friends persuaded me to go the pub that evening as we all celebrated the success of our amazing children in their GCSE’s. I can see the memory so clearly even now as I sat on the picnic bench outside the pub playing with a bottle of beer. Observing the situation and myself like it was some sort of bizarre film. I went into a numb, dissociated state of survival over the next two weeks; I took my boys away for a surreal trip to Southampton, mid-Covid, where we stayed in a 4-star hotel but because neither the restaurant nor spa were open could quite honestly have been a basic budget hotel. I put a smile on my face and tried to stay present and savour each moment with my precious boys. I didn’t even lose my shit when it started hailing (in August) while were cycling through the New Forest and my youngest was moaning every step of the way. I was alive, I had 3 beautiful boys, whether they were moaning or not. I was called into the hospital to have a bone marrow biopsy a week after our holiday. If you’ve never had one I wouldn’t recommend it, to be honest. But they did give me a very large canister of gas and air to distract me from the large needle they were pushing into my pelvis, and I’d forgotten how much fun that could be, with it being a fair few years since I’d been in childbirth! The doctor doing the biopsy was lovely and talked me through every step of what he was doing, and laughed his head off when I asked him to put some dance music on, as I felt like I was in Ministry of Sound – off my tits, I think was the expression I used. I had my first meeting with my allocated Consultant a week later… an apparently emotionless corduroy-clad man with a monotone voice. Don’t get me wrong, my empathy for the horrible things he probably has to tell people, was sitting right under the surface of the hatred and disgust I felt towards him, as he told me that the bone marrow biopsy had confirmed that I did indeed have Myeloma. Oh, and not only that, it wasn’t curable. He rattled out some generic statistics about the average life expectancy being approximately 8-10 years, but this could be prolonged a bit with 6-months of chemotherapy, followed by a stem cell transplant where I would be in hospital for a month, away from the emotional safety of my family, my cats and my friends, and I would lose my hair. Yay, lucky me. I remember looking behind me when he told me the average life expectancy was 8-10 years, to see who he was talking to. An instinctive reaction which I now believe was my intuition saying, who on earth is he talking to because this is not my story? The following few weeks were a complete blur, where I lurched from panic and confusion to a dissociated, detached version of myself, apparently getting on with life but not actually in my body or allowing myself to feel into the enormity of what I’d been told. Sporadically, however, I was able to tap into a grounded sense of determination and strength that this was NOT how my story was going to end. It might be a chapter, but it wasn’t the whole story.