Читать книгу No Ordinary Wedding Planner: Fighting against the odds to help others make their dreams come true - Naomi Thomas - Страница 7

It was decided that I would start chemotherapy as soon as possible. Gramps’s funeral was drawing closer and had been planned around my treatment, giving me a day or two to recover from my first dose. It had been good for cancer to not be at the forefront of my mind; supporting Graham and his family had been my primary concern.

Chemotherapy can ruin your chances of having children. As there was no time to freeze my eggs, the doctors had suggested putting my ovaries to sleep to try and protect them. There was no guarantee that it would work, but Graham and I both thought that it was worth a try. I knew that I needed to come to terms with the fact that we would probably never be able to have children of our own, but, at that very moment, all I wanted was to beat cancer.

Before the chemotherapy could be administered I had a small operation to insert a portacath. This device, which looked very much like a Flying Saucer sherbet penny sweet, fitted snugly onto my ribcage and was connected to my heart via a long tube that would dispense the chemotherapy intravenously. I was so nervous about starting my treatment, not least because I knew there was a good chance it would make me sick. No one particularly likes being sick, but I am terrible at coping with it; I can’t even hear someone vomiting without crying and freaking out a little.

The nurses were lovely, but, as they handled the bags of chemotherapy drugs, they resembled something out of a Hollywood chemical disaster movie. They had to wear protective overalls and huge, armpit-length rubber gloves and protective goggles; not exactly reassuring! I will never forget the feeling as they linked the bag of chemotherapy up to my portacath. I knew that the fluid now seeping into my body was poison and that, even if I’d asked them to stop there and then, my hair would still have fallen out. Deep down, I was heartbroken.

The treatment took around three hours to complete and I went home later that day. Although I felt tired, I was relieved that there was no sickness. All of the research that I’d done had led me to believe that the sickness would eventually catch up with me, but I felt fine the next day. I started to feel positive for the first time since my diagnosis – perhaps I was going to breeze through this after all.

Gramps’s funeral took place a couple of days after my first dose of chemotherapy. It was a beautiful service, and I was so proud of Graham as I watched him carry his granddad’s coffin into the crematorium. Death now had a weird new meaning to me – a sort of realness that hadn’t existed before.

It wasn’t long before my next session was due. It was relentless. As the levels of chemotherapy drugs built up in my body, I began to feel weaker and more tired. I was still lucky as I was never sick, although I wasn’t entirely surprised with the amount of anti-sickness medication that I was on.

A few weeks into my treatment, Mum joined me for my latest dose. During the session she received a phone call to say that her best friend’s son, who had also been fighting cancer, had passed away. Mum had known Brian since he was a young lad, and was absolutely devastated. I knew that my cancer diagnosis had been very hard on her, and that this awful news would now make it that little bit more real.

In that moment, I couldn’t possibly have known that Brian’s death was about to become the beginning of a pattern. As a cancer patient you meet many other people along the way who are sharing your journey. The more involved you get the more heartache you experience, and I found myself attending so many funerals. It never gets any easier, despite the frequency with which bad news comes around – if anything it gets harder.