Hope and Courage

Somehow I managed to get through the two and a half weeks between my neck ultrasound and the appointment with the surgeon! It was an upsetting two weeks. I started off feeling numb, then angry, then just plain upset. Over the last three years I have tried be positive. I’ve kept on a brave face and kept going – because in all honesty I thought that after my surgery that would be the end of it. Never in a million years did I expect to be told my Cancer had come back! I mean, the fact I had been diagnosed with Cancer in the first place was pretty shitty, so for it to come back just felt like a really, really, bad joke.

I know it sounds extreme, but I couldn’t help thinking ‘What if I died?’ and I still think that now. I feel like before my son was born, it would have been something I could deal with. Somehow I’d make it through. But now I have this precious heart to love and protect and I have the strongest urge to survive. I know the most important thing in my life is that child and I plan to be here to see him grow up and have a family of his own. I didn’t realise the strength I could find when I had to dig deeper. I thought I had used up everything I had, but your children fill you with a kind of resolve that can move mountains. I will be strong – for him.

So onto the good news – well, as good as it can be! The Cancer hasn’t been detected in my blood. So although the growth is there, the surgeon feels that for now it can be left to my immune system to fight it. Sounds good apart from the fact I have a shocking immune system and seem to catch everything going! But I trust this surgeon. He looked after me first time round and I know he has my best interests at heart. What this does mean though is that in 6 months, 9 months or maybe even a year, I could find myself in the position of having to have further surgery and possible Radiotherapy. Not ideal, but a far better option than learning it had spread.

So through it all, I have had massive support from my friends and family. The people who really matter show themselves in your time of need. I’m hoping that this is the end of bad news for me. I feel like two miscarriages and a Cancer recurrence should just about be my lot of bad luck, for the year at least- so watch this space – I plan on winning the lottery soon!!

This is me…now

So, I started blogging as a way to deal with what had happened to me. I say happened to me, because I feel like it was something totally out of my control. I didn’t want to get Cancer. I didn’t plan it. But that’s just life. It happens to you whilst you’re busy making other plans.

A few months after I had given birth to my boy I found myself forgetting. There were great big holes in my memory. I couldn’t remember certain details about my life since just after I had my boy. Now I remember his arrival as clear as if it were yesterday. But I don’t remember his first laugh – I only remember it from the photo I took. I don’t remember him rolling over for the first time – but I have a video of it. Until he was about 11 months old there are (still) massive blank spots, filled only by the marvel of technology, where I have been able to take photos and videos and document his growing up.

I found this memory loss terribly upsetting. I felt like I had let him down in some way. How would I be able to tell him tales of when he was young if I couldn’t even remember it myself! I sought out counselling and was told that this was more than likely anxiety caused amnesia. I wanted to get to the root of the problem and talking my worries through with someone really helped. With that I decided to start a blog.

I had been thinking about it for a while and then one of my oldest friends actually started her own sort of mum-advice blog, and this spurred me on to be brave and put everything out there for everyone to read. The thought behind it was that if I could re-live that year, then I would remember it. If talking to someone else was beneficial, then talking (writing) to myself would surely help!

And slowly but surely I waded through the photos (somehow I had taken over 11000 photos in less than a year!) and I watched all the videos (less than a hundred of those haha) and I tried to remember. I used these photos to remind myself of what had been. I started writing and I faced my fears. The more I wrote the more I remembered. Telling the story helped me to get it all out. It was cathartic. It helped me deal with the pain, the anger and frustration. It made me remember the good times too and the support I was lucky enough to have.

I had used my blog to deal with my negative feelings and emotions. I had dealt with them and felt like I could conquer the world! Then suddenly awful things were happening again and I withdrew into myself. I couldn’t bring myself to share these things. I kept them locked away and I stopped writing. I felt as if no one would want to keep reading such heartache and sorrow. It was depressing and I didn’t want to share it.

A couple of months ago, I found the courage to write about my miscarriage. I wanted to work through these feelings and I felt like they had weighed me down long enough. I was pregnant again and I felt like this was it! So much bad stuff had happened, surely now was our time! I felt confident that soon I would have lovely happy pregnancy stories to share!

Less than a month later I miscarried again. It was a shock. I felt like one had been bad enough, but two was just so unfair! I was so angry. I am still angry. It was a Friday and I had started bleeding a few days before. I just knew in my heart that this was exactly like last time. By the time the midwives got me in for a scan the baby was gone. It was like it had never been. I was gutted.

We spent the weekend licking our wounds and then I had to pick myself up and head of to the hospital for my annual check up on my neck. I had an ultrasound scan booked to check that everything was ok, but it turned out it wasn’t.

The Sonographer has found an abnormality with one of my lymph nodes and wanted to do a test on the node to try and draw fluid from it. This involved sticking a needle into my neck and then moving around to try and locate the node, all whilst pushing on my neck with the ultrasound handset. Not the most pleasant experience I have to say! I kept a brave face all through the appointment. In all honesty I felt numb. How could something else have happened to me? How the hell were we going to get through this again?

Time for me

I’ve spent the last two years focused on my boy – I was luckily enough to be able to take 11 months of my maternity and spend almost every day watching my boy grow. Then I went back to work and was again very lucky in that I went to working only 4 days a week, giving me that precious extra day just me and him. We had play dates and snuggles and I spent the days just soaking him in.

Now, 2 years on and I feel like I need time for me. I feel like I need to have some uninterrupted time that is mine. So I have enrolled him into nursery for that extra day. This will give me one day a week where I have no call on my time. No baby to care for. No naps to work my schedule around. No baby, housework and sanity to juggle.

Before I had arranged it I was psyched! I thought ‘OMG I’m going to be able to have a bath and wash my hair in peace. Or paint my nails. Do the weekly shop. Or even get really daring and do the housework without a child attached to my leg!’ But the minute I got the email from the nursery saying yes there’s a space and he can start this week I wanted to burst into tears. The guilt I suddenly felt was overwhelming. How could I want to have time away from my boy? How could I even dream of putting him into nursery on a day when I don’t HAVE to work.

Am I being selfish, wanting time to myself? To pick up extras hours at work, or get my hair done, or just watch a film without the Toot Toot cars wailing in the background. Is it wrong of me to do this? Am I a bad mother?

I think of my friend who went back to work 5 days a week after only 9 months and how hard it was for her. How it almost broke her. And how lucky I’ve been to have this time with my boy. But I also think about how hard it is to be at this small little person’s beck and call and how for my own sanity I need a break from work and from being a mom, even if it’s just for half a day a week. To have a few hours where I don’t have to even speak to anyone if I don’t want to.

It’s his first day tomorrow and I have such mixed emotions I can’t even begin to decide how I feel…so I suppose only time will tell if I’ve made the right choice.

The big C, bump and me

So it’s taken me a while to put what I have felt and been through into words…all the emotions I have experienced over the last two years have been exhausting and it’s taken a lot of focus and work to get to where I am.

We started trying for a baby 10 months before I was diagnosed with Cancer. It was earth shattering. Those words are ones you never expect to hear about yourself. Everyone will know someone who knows someone else who’s been affected by cancer, or personally know someone who’s been affected, but you never expect it to be you.

I was diagnosed in the beginning of June, after a operation to remove a lump in my throat. I had spent the previous year having various tests done, but the results had been inconclusive and so the only way to get a definitive answer was to remove the lump, along with half of my Thyroid. I was confident the prognosis would be ‘benign’ and I would go on with my life as planned. It wasn’t.

I could feel my eyes filling as the doctor spoke and it was the first time I had seen my mom, who was with me for the appointment, unable to hide the concern as she digested what was said. I could hear her voice crack and see the pain in her eyes as she tried to ask the doctor some questions. If the news was upsetting my mom, my rock, the woman who could handle and had handled everything life had thrown at her so far, then this was bad. I felt like I was looking down on myself and it wasn’t really me. I asked the doctor a couple of questions and then left, in a daze, tears running down my face. I had to wait for a further appointment and another operation to remove the remainder of my Thyroid and any lingering Cancer cells. I also had to stop trying for a baby.

I wasn’t sure what was harder to handle. I did what I needed to to cope, and that was to adopt an ‘it is what it is’ attitude. I took the approach that I was lucky. I had the type of Cancer that had a 90% cure rate. If I had this operation I wasn’t going to die. It had turned my life upside down but there were people who had it worse. So I told myself to suck it up and get on with it. I was advised to hold off on the baby thing for at least a year. I decided ‘ok, this means we can do all the things we would find harder to do once we had a baby’. We decided we would plan a trip to New York and we would build the extension on the house. I didn’t realise how badly I had wanted that baby until much later.

Fast forward a month…We were on the way to my parents house when something made me realise that I hadn’t come on my period two days before as usual. I put it down to the stress of the last month, but we stopped and bought a test anyway. We got to my parents, said hello and took our stuff upstairs to get ready for a meal out. I went to pee on a stick for what felt like the hundredth time, and like all those times before I expected a negative result. I hadn’t even finished wee-ing when the little blue line appeared. I went through to the room and waved it at my partner and promptly started crying.

It was all wrong. This wasn’t meant to happen yet. I had spent the last month adjusting to the fact that I couldn’t have a baby yet and now I was pregnant. I was angry, confused and worried. What were we going to do? We held each other and I cried. Then we went downstairs to tell my parents. We couldn’t keep it a secret with everything that was going on – they needed to know.

It wasn’t how I had planned it. Nothing was going my way and I was devastated. This was their first grandchild and I had planned to get them Granny and Grandpa coffee mugs to announce to them when we eventually got pregnant. It wasn’t meant to be such a bitter sweet moment, more bitter than sweet. It was meant to be one of the happiest days of my life and it wasn’t. There wasn’t joyful hugging and laughter, there was concerned looks and tears. There were so many questions surrounding what would happen about my Cancer. Would I still have the operation? Would the baby be ok? Little did I know there was an even tougher question coming.

I rang my Consultant the next day. He was very practical and direct and advised me that he would have to look at the risk to me and the risk to the baby. So basically if the risk to me was higher then I would be unable to carry this child. I had never even contemplated that that would be an option. How could I make the decision between me and my unborn child. I had to distance myself from my pregnancy emotionally and think of it in terms of ‘a baby would be pointless without me here to care for it, and if I couldn’t have this child then it obviously wasn’t meant to be’. I put everything I felt into a box and locked it away. I told him that I understood and I waited for his call.

Here comes the milk…

So being small breasted, I was surprised when on day 4 I woke up looking like Dolly Parton! My milk had come in! I was so excited and couldn’t wait to feed my baby! I felt immense relief that everything was ok and I could continue our breastfeeding journey.

Now that my milk had come in, I was very fortunate in that it had come in in abundance. I had what one of my friends later referred to as ready, aim, fire boobies. Every morning I could literally feed my baby with one boob and, whilst he was feeding, I could express almost another whole bottle from the other (this was great as it meant I could freeze the extra milk ready for when I was due to have surgery a couple of months later). The minute I got ready to feed my boy it was like a switch had been flicked and the milk literally shot out. On more than one occasion he got a spurt of milk to the eye!

On one hand it was amazing to have so much milk with which to feed my child, but it also meant I leaked all the time. I went through 3-4 sets of breast pads a day and constantly had wet patches on my tops – I soon learnt to layer my clothes and stick to dark stuff! I suffered as most woman do with the pain of breast feeding, and anyone who says it doesn’t hurt has been very, very lucky. I combatted the pain issue by watching Netflix while I fed (due to the sheer volume of milk he only fed for maybe 15 minutes at a time) and that took my mind off it. It was this weird, painful, drawing out feeling and after about a month it started to be less painful and more just an odd sensation. I was fortunate in that my little trooper latched beautifully, and so I didn’t suffer with blisters or bleeding. I personally think that’s the trick to successful breast feeding– if your baby can latch on right then it’s unlikely that you will get blisters, and no blisters = less pain. I also used tons of nipple cream. I tried different brands to find the one that worked best for me and found there were two – Lanolin, which was great for a good soak before bed, and Bennetts, which has the same consistency as Savlon and so was really soothing when I was feeling a bit raw.

I won’t lie to you, it was hard. Some days (or more specifically nights) I would sit there feeding my baby and feel the weight of the responsibility crushing me. Every time he cried for milk it was on me, but I knew this was the decision I had made and I had to stick to it. I had tremendous support from my other half and that made it possible for me to continue for as long as I did. He would do all the burping at night, allowing me to wake up, feed and then go back to sleep while he settled the boy.

I was only able to breast feed for the first 3 months due to needing surgery and possibly radiotherapy, but working as a team we were able to stick to plan A and give our son the start we had wanted and it was the most amazing experience for me.