I am probably the wussiest person I know. I almost cried when I somehow found myself on the pirate ship at Chessington World of Adventures. If you put me in the same room as a rodent I will end up standing on a chair like someone from a Tom and Jerry cartoon. I have a friend who used to come and check under my bed whenever I was left home alone as a teenager. Yes, sometimes I do front up to things I’m scared of, but there is a long list of adjectives I’d apply to myself before I hit upon the word “brave”.
Yet since I got my breast cancer diagnosis last summer, it is a word lots of people have used about me. I’m not complaining – people have meant it kindly – but I would argue that so far it hasn’t really applied. I have been scared on many occasions, self-pitying on others – and sometimes both at the same time. When I was told I was ill and had a 5cm grade three tumour I feared the worst and spent several days crying and worrying. Ahead of starting my chemotherapy several weeks later I spent a lot of time dreading the drugs I was about to be given and the whole process of having them fed into me by the port they had put into my chest.
Every week when they punctured my skin to put in the line from the drip I winced. I still look the other way whenever I have a blood test, I cried whenever my hair fell out, and I’ve often asked: “Why me?” I would say I have had some stoical moments, but “brave” suggests something more active and stronger than I think I’ve been.
I think the way I have acted is pretty much the same way anyone would act. I want to get better and move on so I’ve agreed to the treatment I’ve been offered, no matter the side-effects. I’ve smiled when things have been rubbish because even then there were still things to smile about. I have, occasionally, not felt as good as I’ve pretended, but that was more social conditioning than bravery.
The people who I think are brave are those who trialled the drugs I now take. The carers who look after their loved ones and keep smiling and encouraging them, even when they are tired and scared themselves. But some of them may also say that they don’t feel brave.
I haven’t really needed to be all that brave so far. Throughout my treatment experts have been there to hold my hand, sometimes literally. This has made things less scary. I’ve had to engage with the explanations of the treatment and sometimes faced a choice of paths, but I’ve felt that the difficult bit was in someone else’s power. Those people are experts and if you trust them, as I do, you can get a lot of comfort.
While you’re having treatment you are in someone else’s hands. You are having an active intervention. You can believe that anything bad is being blasted by the drugs. That nothing would dare harm you. You are being monitored by experts and can relax knowing they should spot any problems. You feel you can ask their advice about even the most minor change in yourself that you’ve spotted.
There is something daunting about emerging from this as I now am. Surprisingly, I feel I will need to be braver at this point than I have been since being diagnosed. It’s a bit like I’m a wild animal being released from captivity – I have to learn how to cope in the big bad world without the support networks I have been leaning on heavily for the last few months.
In theory, I am pretty much fixed. The chemo and the surgery have been effective, and the radiotherapy I’ve had and tablets I am taking will hopefully put paid to any cancer that might still be lurking. The doctors have talked positively about what they’ve done, and have told me I’m doing all I can to prevent a recurrence.
But once you stop being poked and prodded you wonder what could go wrong. There are still checkups, but the time between them is longer and I will need to take back responsibility for monitoring myself the rest of the time.
Things will never be exactly as they were. I will need to be more careful now that my adrenal glands don’t work and I have to take hydrocortisone every day (as I type I realise I’ve forgotten my lunchtime dose). Even getting over the treatment will take longer than I’d realised – I’ve been warned that it could be a year before I get over chemo physically. I don’t look much different from when I went off sick, but bits of me are broken or gone. And it may be a while before the bits that are left are back up to speed.
People have often said I look well (which I’ve taken as code for having a bit of a fat face), so I do worry that they will expect the same from me as from someone who hasn’t been through the mill. More than that, I wonder how to go back to looking to the future without caveats. I’m apprehensive about planning a holiday for this year and looking beyond that fills me with fear.
I used to think a lot about myself as an older person. I imagine it was partly because my grandma seemed to enjoy her later years – after my grandad died, she reunited with her friends from school and her cousins. She spent Friday afternoons enjoying long lunches with all of them, and the rest of the week catching up with individuals over coffee or on the phone. There was sadness that my grandad wasn’t around any more, and I included that in my vision of the future – I wasn’t sugar-coating it. But now I find it difficult to think about any of that without crying. That picture of me as an old lady feels more tinged with hope than expectation.
It’s like I have lost my innocence. But I am hoping that this will wear off as time goes on.
At some point, all being well, I will need to drop the caveats like the one I just typed. I will need to move to a new way of living, to give away the hats I bought without worrying that I’m tempting fate by doing so, to book trips without looking at them through the prism of cancer. I need to be braver than before – but I will never go back on that pirate ship.
Hilary Osborne is the Guardian’s money and consumer editor
