‘Do you need a minute, Catherine?’
‘No, I’m fine, please carry on,’ I replied in an exaggerated, cheerful way.
‘On a positive note, we know it’s not a secondary tumour, so there’s no cancer elsewhere in your body. We managed to scrape much of it out, but because of its awkward positioning, we couldn’t remove it all. So the next course of action will be radiotherapy to try and prevent it from destroying any other parts of the brain.’
‘Okay then, well, thank you very much,’ I chirped.
I don’t know why, but I felt compelled to shake his hand like we’d just completed a business deal.
SIMON
Montefalco
18 March
Breaking the news to Luca and Sofia that their mother wasn’t immortal was the hardest illusion I’d ever shattered. I took them to lunch at a restaurant near Lake Trasimeno, a place where I’d occasionally brought them as children, to hike and to pretend to fish.
Luca at fourteen and Sofia at almost sixteen responded to the news with tears, disbelief and denial. They were angry with their father for failing to protect their mother, at her doctors for not repairing her, and at Luciana for instilling a time limit on their relationship.
But I made them promise to take their distress out on me and not her. Instead they gave her cuddles, picked her flowers from the gardens and filled her iPhone with music to listen to during her first hospital stay.
It’s difficult to reconcile the knowledge there’s something feeding on your body when you can’t see it or swipe it away. Only when the physicality of its damage becomes visible does it make it real. In Luciana’s case, the gravity of the situation hit home when she had her double mastectomy. While it wouldn’t cure her, it might give us more time.
‘Sometimes I feel like I’m trapped on a conveyor belt but if I try and get off it, I’ll die,’ Luciana muttered.
I stroked her arm as she floated on a glorious cloud of morphine above her sterile hospital bed. ‘I know, darling,’ I whispered, ‘but if it means the kids and I get to share more time with you, then it’s worth it.’
‘Remind me of that after the chemotherapy begins,’ she replied, before closing her eyes and setting sail for the skies again.
CATHERINE
Northampton
18 March
Telling the children my tumour was cancerous was almost as hard as when I explained their daddy wasn’t coming home and was likely dead.
Even though they were adults, I still reassured them everything was going to be okay, like mothers do, although I couldn’t be sure it would. Emily responded practically, by planning care rotas and making sure I never went for treatment alone.
Robbie drove home every Friday night to stay for weekends and help out where he could around the house, and James promised to call every day no matter where in the world he was.
Shirley, Baishali, and Tom’s new bride Amanda filled my freezer drawers with a never-ending supply of hot pots, pastries and casseroles. Selena was already responsible for area-managing my boutiques, so it made sense for her to take the reins and oversee the rest of the business too.
It was only when the fuss died down and I was home alone that the seriousness of my situation hit me. I wrote a card for Olivia’s fourth birthday and wondered if I’d be around to see her next one, then couldn’t stop myself from crying my eyes out.
I hadn’t sobbed that hard since we’d found Oscar’s lifeless body in his basket a decade earlier. I remembered how each one of us took it in turns to hold him, stroke him and brush his ginger and black wiry coat and tell him how much we’d miss him. Then I wrapped him in a blanket and carried him to the bottom of the garden, where Robbie had dug a hole under the crab-apple tree as deep as his arms could stretch.
We gently placed Oscar into the ground and lay Simon’s running shoes by his side, before heaping soil and tears on his final resting place. I smiled when I wondered if that’s what the kids would do to me, too.
At an age where I should have been thinking about taking my foot off the accelerator, I was desperately trying to stay in the car.
SIMON
Montefalco
17 April
Luciana had shied away from examining her altered appearance in the hospital room, preferring to do it in the cosiness of our home.
She stood before our bedroom mirror, unbuttoned her loose-fitting blouse and carefully unravelled the zigzag of bandages that covered her torso like an Egyptian mummy. A six-inch horizontal scar lay beneath, lip-red and raised. At a glance you’d be mistaken for thinking it had been clumsily hacked off with pinking shears.
‘I once kept a roof over my mother’s and my head with these,’ she lamented. ‘Now I’m a monstrosity.’
I wrapped my arms around her waist but she tried to edge away. So I held on tighter. And looking her reflection in the eye, I tenderly traced her scar from right to left as she steadied her shaking hands on my arm.
‘I hate it,’ she continued.
‘I don’t,’ I replied. ‘Your loss is my gain. It’s a beautiful scar because it means I get to keep you for longer.’
CATHERINE
Northampton
18 April
Information and a positive mental attitude were the most powerful weapons I could have in my armoury. At least that’s what the Internet told me.
I began my fight by taking the laptop to my bedroom, placing it on my knees and learning about the enemy within from the comfort of my own duvet. I searched on Google for survival statistics, then message boards and forums, asking questions and weeping at stories written in memoriam about those who’d lost the fight.
No matter how many positive things I read, it was always the negative ones that stuck in my head. And sometimes I’d have rock-bottom moments where I thought ‘sod it’ and wondered how much easier it’d be if I gave in and let nature take its course. But there was still so much of life I wanted to experience, so many places I hadn’t travelled to and business opportunities I wanted to explore. I wasn’t ready to give up.
I drank cup after cup of herbal tea and munched on snacks high in antioxidants while researching complementary treatments and holistic remedies.
When I next found myself at the hospital, with my face covered in wet plaster bandages, my scar was healing and my hair was gradually growing back from when it had been shaved for the operation. Staff at the radiotherapy unit had to make a mould of my head to create a Perspex mask before my treatment began.
Once it was complete, I sat with my mask in my lap, tracing the impression of the curves, crevices, lumps and bumps of my head. It was then attached to a table and, with my head slotted inside it, I was kept perfectly still while, five days a week for seven weeks, a machine blasted my dent with a ten-minute burst of radiation.