Yesterday was the one year anniversary of when I was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. On 26th February 2019 I walked into my consultant’s room and learnt that the lumps in my neck, armpit and chest were actually cancer.
I'm not really sure what direction this post is going to go in, but I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that I want to get out of my system.
Sometimes I find it difficult to talk about how much cancer has changed me. It's hard to strike a balance between being honest, but not sharing so much that it makes the people around me worry unnecessarily.
12 months ago I started chemotherapy. My ‘journey’ through treatment wasn’t easy, but eventually, I made it to the end, and in October I found out I was in full remission.
When I received that phone call with my scan results, I didn’t feel how I expected to feel. I thought I would be filled with this overwhelming joy and happiness, eager to start celebrating.
Instead, I felt broken.
Around the same time, I attended the Shine Great Escape in Manchester and it completely changed my life. I spent a weekend with an incredible group of young adults who have also experienced a cancer diagnosis. I’ll never forget the advice and support I received. Those few days helped me realise that it’s normal to have mixed emotions when it comes to cancer. When you think about it, it makes a lot of sense. How many people would be able to go through a life-threatening illness and find that they can continue exactly how they did before? How many people would feel completely "normal"?
For the past few months, I’ve felt like I’ve been doing a lot better. My struggle with anxiety and depression is ongoing, but I’ve learnt to be more patient and accept that recovery takes time. Small steps are better than no steps, and it's important to recognise and celebrate the progress I've already made. In November I went back to work part-time. In December, I started exercising again. Last week, I went to Berlin - a city I've been wanting to tick off my list for years.
But unfortunately, it isn’t always easy to maintain that positivity.
In the past couple of weeks, three of my fellow “escapees” that I met in Manchester have passed away.
Each time I saw the news pop up in our shared WhatsApp group, I crumbled. Yesterday it all got too much, and I couldn’t hold back the tears. “Survivor’s Guilt” is a term used to describe when a person experiences feelings of guilt because they survived when others did not. I've been feeling it a lot these past few weeks, and it's hard (although this article has helped a lot).
I’m so thankful to Shine for reaching out to offer support to all of us who attended that escape. I hope we can meet up again soon. It would be easy under these circumstances to think it’s too hard having friends within the cancer community. However, the benefits of being part of this supportive network far outweigh the sad times.
Charlene, Alice, and Naomi were all amazing women, and my thoughts are with their families and friends.
Cancer is shit.
❤️
Top image credit: Debby Hudson on Unsplash
