Daily Mirror (Northern Ireland)
My wife and I took turns in battles against cancer
RADIO 2 DJ Johnnie Walker shares how he went from cancer patient to cancer carer...
On the evening my wife Tiggy told me she had been diagnosed with breast cancer, we did what any couple probably would – we cried and held each other tight.
It was a fortnight before Christmas. A lump on her right breast had been identified as malignant. I was shocked.
Tiggy was so healthy. She ate well, exercised, didn’t smoke. It didn’t seem possible she could be ill. She was 52 at the time and a picture of wellbeing. We’d felt certain that the lump would be a cyst. I felt physically sick at the news.
But in those darkest of moments, we also found the strength to smile. I remember saying to her: “Well, at least now it’s an equal opportunities marriage.”
Exactly 10 years earlier, in 2003, I myself had been diagnosed with nonhodgkin lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system. We’d only been married three months at that point – I actually developed the first symptoms while on honeymoon in India.
Tiggy had to give up her job as a commercials producer to become my full-time carer.
The illness and chemo ravaged me. I dropped to eightand-a-half stone and spent several weeks in intensive care.
Yet Tiggy was there every step of the way. She was a rock. She washed me, fed me and sat for hours with me in hospital. She gave me a reason to keep fighting.
Now it was my turn to do the same for her. Tiggy often said that being the cancer patient is easier than being the carer. And in many ways that’s true.
When you’re the patient, you have ready-built support networks, from doctors and surgeons to friends and family. You’re allowed to have mood swings and be down. Your job is just to get better.
But as the carer, you’re experiencing all these agonising emotions – a complete helplessness as the person you love fights to stay alive – but you have to stay strong too. You have to be the positive one. And that means some days there’s a gulf between how you feel and how you have to behave.
It’s a long, lonely journey. In my life, I’ve battled depression and cocaine addiction as well as cancer, but being a carer was the most draining of all.
There is increasing recognition of that. Charities such as Carers UK offer support. But when you’re going through it all, it’s still difficult to know where to her shoulders and I set to work with a razor I’d bought specially. When it was finished, I looked at her and noticed for the first time she had this perfectlyshaped head. I was stood there saying: “Wow!” She looked amazing.
I became the official chauffer too. When she was undergoing radiotherapy in June, I’d drive us from our north Dorset home to Poole Hospital every day, wait while the treatment was carried out and then take us home.
Those journeys weren’t easy because we still didn’t know if the treatment would work. The pressure caused an argument or two.
There was one time she said the stress of our marriage had caused her illness. That’s not easy to hear but you accept it because when someone is going through trauma like that, they lash out. I know I did during my battle.
For one week while she underwent treatment, we stayed in a friend’s beach hut in Mudeford Spit, close to the hospital. It sounds strange but it was a