‘I kissed my husband and daughter and tried to look confident walking away, my heart erratic’
As family outings go, it was grim. There wasn’t much to say as the three of us sat huddled in the hospital car park at 7am on that January morning two years ago.
Deciding it was best for us all to end the raw, gaping silence, I kissed my husband and daughter and tried to look confident walking away.
Major abdominal cancer surgery awaited and my heart thumped erratically. My priority wasn’t me, it was our daughter, and everything had been skewed so far to try to propel her through the trauma of it. “I’m going to be fine, I promise,” I begged.
A passionate scientist, she testily asked how I could be so sure. I had endometrial cancer so needed a full hysterectomy which, even with keyhole surgery, is a massive operation.
As we gathered to carve me up, I decided that rather than stand around discussing the enormity of it all, we’d have a canine chit-chat.
Meticulous surgeon Ken Metcalf (Irish setters) used an anaesthetist who owned red setters. In retrospect this still seems typically seamless of him.
His nurse Beccy had a sausage dog but I managed to convert her to the wonder of whippets during my stay and this still remains a personal victory.
Overriding everything was the nagging concern that what our teenage daughter urgently needed to know was that I was back on the ward and, only once there, did I let go and succumb to the plunging numbness of morphine.
I hadn’t bargained on the days clutching a pillow to your wound and the constant, drilling pain. Gruelling months of recovery, too, were a surprise, with their “of course you can’t lift a kettle” and the triumph of walking 50 yards. If what the Princess of Wales said yesterday sounded encased in steel, it was for her children. Cancer is a hugely evocative word for a plethora of differing illnesses. For a child, knowing that the woman who gave you life has had this diagnosis, is something that requires repeatedly revisiting as they grow up. The maternal struggle is that, for once, this is something that you simply cannot fix.
Weakened from surgery, you can only try to reassure. But you know them, you know their tells.
Their pain is all you mull over, before reaching the heartbreaking conclusion that you can only helplessly watch their suffering until you can regroup and properly help them to rise again.
A cancer battle is half physical and half emotional. Lucky then that oncology wards are among the kindest places on earth. My rule of thumb is that it requires about the same amount of time as the tumour’s treatment takes to unfurl emotionally again once you’re discharged. Having been in flight or flight for months, you can’t just click back. And, of course, as you’ve all dug deeper than you’ve ever dug before, you’ve all irrevocably changed.
The work is hard and you flail as you re-find yourselves.
Yet I’m a firm believer that good often comes out of adversity, and it has.
Molly is now at university and recently overcame a major setback swiftly and decisively, with the words: “My parents have both had cancer, so now I process quickly.” She’s magnificent, big-hearted and resilient. We’re well now. And she’s our hero.