About Nuala…

Working on The Cancer Club has been a much more challenging experience than I expected. It seemed like a good idea at the time. I had been speaking at a business event and had talked about my journey with breast cancer. A woman approached me during the break and told me that she was really envious of my ability to talk about it. She told me that she was also journeying with breast cancer but had told only one close friend. She hadn’t told her family because ‘they would freak out’ and she had never confided in anyone at her place of work. She said that she was surprised to hear her colleagues commenting on my bravery when I had been so honest about my fear.

I decided shortly after that, that I would publish my journals in an attempt to get people talking about the realities of some of the life challenging situations many of us will experience at some point in our lives. People consider me to be brave, gutsy, a fighter, and I certainly couldn’t be accused of taking breast cancer lying down. However, I have to admit that this has been one of the hardest and most painful chapters of my life. There is no right way to ‘do’ breast cancer, just like there’s no right way to ‘do’ anything much. There are times I feel that I’m penalised because I do, where possible, try to get on with it. I do try to carry on with my life as much as possible. In the end though, you create a situation where people forget that you are struggling with the effects of drugs, with the emotional impacts of the surgery, the treatment and the uncertainty. Life continues to hand you more challenges, and the proverbial shit still happens.

For the past fifteen years I’ve worked as a coach and a facilitator of leadership development in the corporate arena. I see a lot of problems, and a lot of pain, caused by poor and inadequate communication. I’ve really come to believe that the quality of communication in our lives has a major positive or negative impact on us. I cannot tell you how frustrating I found some of the platitudes that flew around me when I was in the very early days of being diagnosed. There were times when you’d have been forgiven for thinking I had a broken toe-nail. I truly do understand that people mean well. I honestly do. But not being heard at such a challenging time is extremely difficult.

I am brave and I am strong. But I am human and vulnerable and have been frightened and challenged by some of the events of the past four years. It’s not as if I hadn’t already dealt with a number of challenging events in my life.

The Cat With Nine Lives

I have always considered myself to be a healthy person. I don’t smoke and I am a seriously light weight drinker. Although like most women, I see my body through fairground mirrors, I’ve always been well within a healthy weight range. I don’t get colds and sniffles and until recently I didn’t believe in migraines.

However, I seem to end up in life threatening situations more than the average person. A close encounter with a 32 tonne truck left me with a serious head injury, many broken bones and a permanently damaged ankle. A few years later, a particularly nasty bout of malaria attacked my brain and had me within hours of dying. I hit my head whilst climbing a mountain in Brazil to raise money for breast cancer and ended up having a seizure and being evacuated to the hospital. As a child, I spent weeks in hospital having my appendix and my tonsils removed. As a tiny baby I had to have a growth removed from my head so my seeming desire for drama started early.

And by the way, I spent my childhood in Belfast during the time it was in the grip of the worst sectarian violence in its’ history.

If we include challenging situations that weren’t necessarily life-threatening then I could talk about the kidney stones whose exit was more painful than the births of either of my daughters. Then there was the pneumonia that laid me low for a couple of weeks. Then there were the four miscarriages I had over a five year period. I was twenty weeks pregnant with the first of those when my sister died at the age of 33 from lung cancer. I had my scan the following week where it was discovered that my baby had died. I still can’t believe that I was left to walk around with a dead baby inside me for the next week.

I hit forty, fit, well and happy and never for a moment imagined that breast cancer would be next on my list of mountains to climb. I’ve always considered myself to be strong, brave and resilient. I never imagined that I could be as frightened of anything as I have been in the days since I dreamt that I was dying of cancer.

I have seen close up the way cancer ravages lives. My sister was stick thin by the time she went for what was then pioneering lung transplant surgery. She and I spoke a number of times about my car accident and her lung cancer and how you never believe that it’s going to be you. We tried to talk sometimes about what would happen if she didn’t make it but I always pulled back, encouraged her to be positive, to stay hopeful. I always feel sad when I think that there were things that she wanted to say that I just wasn’t able to hear.

By the time my father got lung cancer I had grown enough to be able to talk openly with him. I was able to listen to him and just be there with him. I will never ever regret that, hard as it was. I’m still surprised at how many people around me have never attempted to talk with me about the challenges of the past four years. Half way through my treatment I was told that the cancer had spread throughout my body and that my disease was terminal. For a week I, and my family, lived with that belief before the diagnosis was overturned, when it was found to be the effects of one of the newer drugs that I had been prescribed.

I only realised when I was putting together The Cancer Club how I, and those around me, buried that whole incident and how differently I have felt ever since. I remember feeling completely detached the day I was given the news. It was only whilst going through my journals for material for The Cancer Club that I really faced the fact that I still haven’t really dealt with that whole episode and I am still living through the repercussions of that.

It may sound strange to anyone reading this. You’d think that if you were told you were going to die, you’d want to have a party when you found out it was a mistake. Maybe it’s like that sometimes for some people. I had really only begun to come to terms with my cancer when that happened. I believe it completely overwhelmed and undermined me and I probably buried myself in work so I didn’t have to think about it. When you are told you are going to die everyone is sympathetic. When they find out it’s a mistake there’s a sort of ‘Phew! Thank God that’s over’. And people move on. But I’m only coming to realise now that I didn’t. Hopefully now that I’m aware of that I can do something about it.

I suppose my point is that it’s amazing that between the professionals surrounding me and all the other interested parties, that no-one thought that I should, perhaps, have had a few days off and that maybe we should have had some conversations about it. Maybe we should have talked about some of the feelings we had. I believe now that I should have been encouraged to deal with it and face up to what I was feeling. Instead it became a non-event and I remained detached and threw myself even further into work feeling very little other than frustration and anger.

So, I have some talking, and probably a lot of crying, to do. I’ll let you know how it goes.