How a small revelation, planting a seed of worry, worked its way into a life-changing experience at the intersection of fear and acceptance
It was this really disgusting mole. It made my eight-year-old daughter, zipping me into a dress I was way too fat for, go, “Mom, there’s something gross on your back.” I assumed she meant the parts of me that had zipped upwards with the dress, but it turned out to be a mole.
I asked her to take a photo of it. And that was the first time Fear showed up. Fear sat down and helpfully pointed out the worrying parts of the blurry image that was making a deep-down part of me hurt. The dermatologist, the results (Melanoma! So deep! Must operate!), the scans, the operation to remove a huge part of my back and several of my lymph nodes.
This all passed in a blur of tests and, let’s be perfectly honest here, complete denial. The second time Fear arrived was in the surgeon’s office. I had named him Sir Doctor because the operation to remove the mole had also removed the head of the giant dragon tattooed on my back (Yes, this tattoo was by choice. No, I wasn’t drunk).
Sir Doctor told me the cancer had metastasised to my lymph nodes and I was to see an oncologist and start treatment. I was a cancer patient. I had melanoma. I had an eight-year-old daughter and I wanted to see her fall in love.
Fear, at this point, stopped being a bastard and became my friend. I met Fear in the bathroom when I excused myself from Sir Doctor’s rooms and sat on top of a startlingly beige toilet. “I’ll beat this,” I said. “I will. I am stronger than this. I. Can. Do. This.”
Fear, this time, took my hand and led me back into the rooms. Fear said, “I’ve got this.” Then, as I proceeded to see an oncologist and start a regime with an immunotherapy treatment that made me so sick I could barely walk, Fear changed who I was and how I saw my life. Everything became scary.
Everything became too much. I was afraid of returning the shoes my daughter had outgrown before wearing them. I was afraid of doing my accounts because the numbers felt too big. I was afraid of going to the shops because it was too far away.
And one day, as I insisted on cooking dinner because, “I’m not a bloody victim, dammit!”, I discovered that cooking pasta was absolutely terrifying. Was the water too hot? Was it too cold? How long should the pasta cook for? What if the sauce took longer and the pasta got cold?
I sat on the floor in my kitchen with the pasta packet in one hand and the pot in the other and I realised, in that moment, that Fear had stopped being my friend. It was time for me to stop binge-watching Twilight movies (yes, yes) and hiding behind anti-anxieties and sleeping pills and the looming visage of death.
It was time to stop being a cancer patient and start being Tamsin who happens to have cancer. I started my chemo with daily treatments of four to six hours. The canula stayed in my hand for the week and I was given weekends off.
When that finished, I was on self-administered injections into my stomach three times a week for a year. Every dose making me so sick that I would have to wrap myself in blankets with a hot water bottle in the middle of the African summer because I was so cold. It was grim. But it didn’t define me.
That day, on the floor of my kitchen (which really did need a clean in the corner of the fridge), I told Fear it was time for me to make cancer my friend instead. I’m still scared. I still have moments when I want to make a blanket fort and pretend I’m fine.
But I can do my accounts, I can run my business, I can stare my diagnosis in the face (it came back), and, possibly most importantly, I can make mac and cheese again. Thank goodness.
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