The summer before last, I was getting ready to leave my family on holiday in France while I came home to England. My children, who were seven and four, held on to me tightly, looking pale and serious. But they were too frightened to protest, the way they would have done if I’d been leaving them with a babysitter for the evening. We all knew there was something wrong with me, and I was heading off into the unknown.
About eight weeks earlier, my face had become swollen and puffy. Then my neck had followed, and eventually my whole upper body. I looked weird, I felt faint, I could hardly stay awake. I was 39.
The day before we had set off on that holiday, an ultrasound had found a large, sinister mass, half-hidden behind my ribs. Ultrasound can’t see through bone, the sonographer told me, but I needed a scan that could, and quickly. The NHS promises that cancer tests will take place within two weeks – an impressively short time, until you’re in it, waiting to know if you are going to live or die. We decided we would still go on our holiday rather than spend those two weeks waiting around at home. It would be fun and distracting. And there was another reason: it suddenly felt urgent to make nice memories for the kids. Even though I looked so strange, I wanted to make sure there were plenty of photos with me in them, instead of staying behind the camera as usual.
In quiet moments, my husband and I tried to think ahead. If I was dying, should I write cards for all the children’s future birthdays? Was there anything I could leave behind that would make things better for them? But everyone knows there is no “better” when you lose your mum. I kept thinking about interviews I had read with people like Eddie Izzard and Marco Pierre White, on whom that experience had left a scar that would never heal. When my children were babies, I had read every book about parenting I could find in an effort to avoid fucking them up, and here I was, about to do it anyway, and in the worst possible way.
The call came, and I took an early flight back. It turned out I had a kind of non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and that large mass, about the size of a mug of tea, was almost completely blocking the vein that drains the top half of my body into my heart. That autumn I spent eight weeks in hospital, cumulatively: six rounds of chemo, each one a six-day stay, and four emergency admissions. But I was lucky. A year and a half later I’m still here, not only in remission but 100% well. The treatment gave me an early menopause, and my previously straight hair, which all fell out, has come back curly. Otherwise you would never know it had happened.
The Princess of Wales hasn’t said what kind of cancer she has, and nor is it any of our business. But in her video message she suggests the prognosis is good. I hope, a year or two from now, she’s like me, looking back with horror and asking: did that actually happen to me? I still wonder how much it affected my children. Most of the time they seem completely unscathed; other times I’m not sure.
A Macmillan volunteer gave us two great unexpected pieces of advice about talking to kids about cancer: make sure they realise it isn’t their fault, and make sure they know they can’t catch it. Apparently those worries are common, but adults don’t usually realise it. Another good bit of advice from a neighbour, a psychotherapist, was to give the children something active to do; going through a potentially traumatic situation is much worse when you feel like a helpless passenger. It wasn’t easy – we were all pretty helpless – but a sponsored walk for Macmillan gave them a sense of making a difference.
There aren’t many things you can learn from having cancer, apart from how awful it is. But it does help you to focus on what is important. Now I’ve been given my life back – potentially decades of it – I think a lot about what I should do. Kate probably has to put up with more rubbish than most of us, especially so in the past few weeks. I hope, in the middle of everything that’s grim about this experience, it brings her some comforting clarity about what actually matters.
• Marina McIntyre is deputy audience editor of the Guardian
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