I’ve got a rocky road ahead but I want to find romance, fly first class to New York, and play bingo with my sisters
DEALING WITH HER CANCER
and a drug treatment course for the cancer. My first question was, ‘Do I have to have chemo again?’ But apparently not. It’s going to be a rocky road but I have amazing friends and family around me.”
Linda says her greatest sadness is for the worry she is causing her two brothers and four sisters.
CRYING
“I can see the devastation in all their faces,’ she says. “We’re just not ready for this again. Maureen rang me all upbeat, saying ‘You’re going to be fine’. Then she started crying.
“And Coleen was filming Loose Women in London on her own so I decided not to tell her. But she kept texting asking if I’d had the results so I had to phone and say, ‘Col, I wasn’t going to tell you… and she just said, ‘It’s back isn’t it?’. ‘Yeah’, I replied. And I could hear it all in her voice again.” But breaking the news to her niece, Bernie’s daughter Erin, 17, was always going to be hardest.
“She sent me a message, ‘That bugger cancer just won’t feck off. Looks like you’re going to have to kick its a*se all over again.’ I replied saying, ‘I only get pain in my left leg so I’ll kick its a*se with my good leg’. I feel so bad for Erin. She’s seen too much cancer already.”
Bernie and Linda were both tested for the BRCA gene thought to cause breast cancer in some families, but the results were negative. “The professor did say it’s Coleen, Linda, Maureen and Bernie
When I wake I think ‘I’ve got cancer’. But then I think ‘I am going to fight this’ LINDA NOLAN ON HOW SHE’S LIVING WITH HER DISEASE
not just bad luck,” says Linda, who was first diagnosed in 2007.
“We will have a rogue gene. They just haven’t found it yet.” She admits she is scared – but is determined to be living with cancer, not dying from it.
“I am back on sleeping tablets because night time is the longest when you lie there with your thoughts,” she says. “So now I take a tablet at 11 and know I’ll be asleep by half past through till seven. When I wake the first thing I think is, ‘I’ve got cancer’. But the second is, ‘I am still alive and I am going to fight this’.”
The pink feather boa is wrapped around her walking frame and her hospital room is filled with flowers and chocolates from friends and relatives. The Nolan family is clearly a lifeline. Sister Denise has rented a flat near the hospital and there is a rota of visitors.
And then there is that other special support for Linda too – from Brian and Bernie. “I think they’re up there together in heaven saying, ‘Go on girl’.
“I have got lots of life to live. I have got lots of reasons to stay alive. And be alive.”