About 6 weeks after treatment had finished I hit rock bottom. I had thought I would be feeling much better at this stage. In all honesty I think the past few months caught up with me and once the morphine was lifting the truth and weight of what I had gone through hit me hard. I kept crying, for no apparent reason. It wasn’t as if anything triggered the tears and deep moments of depression, they just came over me. Barley a day would go by without me feeling this way. I had experienced phases of depression before, delayed / buried feelings about the deaths of my mum and grandma coming back in my adult years. I had got through this with counselling and felt I needed it again.
I e-mailed my CNS to let her know I was struggling and thought I needed some more support. She directed me to some online resources. I decided to contact Macmillan. They have been fantastic, from the first call where we chatted through the experience to the counselling I received. They arranged for me to have an assessment over the phone. The result from this showed I was suffering from depression, catastrophising, trauma and OCD.
When you have come face to face with your own mortality everything else seems strange, especially when you start coming through the other side of it. I almost had some kind of imposter syndrome, which became even more apparent when I started to return to work. Add to that survivor’s guilt, why did I manage to beat my cancer, but my mum and grandma couldn’t. This made me feel like I have to go at life full pelt, but I just kept getting hit by waves of exhaustion and immense sadness which left me more and more frustrated with how slowly I was recovering. The counselling really helped me to process everything. This had to be done over the phone due to covid, and we drifted around topics from one session to another. A key theme was coming to terms with how being someone with cancer had fundamentally changed me, but that this wasn’t apparent to others. I didn’t look like I had cancer, I had most of my hair. A phrase I used was that most of my scars were on the inside, literally as in my throat. People can’t see how dry and sore my mouth is when I try to eat. More than that, it was the deep psychological and emotional scars, that I struggled to understand let alone explain to anyone. My thought processing was slower, maybe a bit of chemo brain or even the meds.
A common theme with people who have fought this beast is getting some exercise and out into the fresh air to help cope. Slowly, day by day I built strength up again. I started to join Nick for the first part of the dog walks, I couldn’t manage the whole thing, but it felt so good. Once I felt able to I started to take her out on my own a little, just down the back pathway to start with. The arthritis and PEG issues laid me up more than the cancer and I didn’t walk her at all for a few weeks, but the joy of picking this back up most definitely aided my recovery. I had some blips, most notably on a couple of mornings when we encountered other dog walkers. She will sit and stay nicely if the other person just keeps going past, one woman just couldn’t get this when I asked her and I was crying by the time she eventually carried on, with Pip pulling to sniff her dog and I blurted something out about having cancer – she just looked at me strangely. A couple of days later we had enjoyed a lovely walk, I had a bag full of poo in one hand and was heading to the bin, not noticing the adjoining path opposite, with that Pip picked up the scent of another dog. She whipped round me one day, the lead skinning a knuckle and the poo flew in the other direction as she playfully launched herself at the poor old golden retriever. I burst into tears, again blurting out that I was exhausted from the cancer and just wanted some fresh air. My pride hurt more than my hand, although I did develop a couple of belting bruises. Thankfully I have bumped into this gentleman a couple more times, he always asks after me, I have apologised and reassured him I am on the mend and she is behaving more.
Starting to see people again also helped. Simple things like managing to make a birthday cake for my granddaughter. I couldn’t eat any, but it was so good to see her, I’d gone just over four months shielding through my treatment. I did feel a bit of pressure about who I should be seeing first and how family members might take it. I really wanted to make it to my granddaughter’s birthday party but felt guilty that this was before I was going to see my brother and dad. In the end we went. I took my meds along and managed a little make up, discovering on the day that most of my eyelashes had gone! People told me I looked well, I was very sceptical – that’s a whole new game I started to play. Judging the honesty and subtext of people’s reactions to seeing me. You have to find amusement somewhere!!
For my birthday hubbie and I took the dog for a walk by the reservoir. It was a low key affair, but happy enough. I really wasn’t up to much fuss and barely eating.
Seeing my brother, dad and co for the first time was overwhelming, but a joyous occasion too. I managed to decorate the house and we celebrated all the key dates we had missed, due to both cancer and covid. I managed to eat some of the buffet and a sip or two of bubbly. In fact, that was the day my taste started to return as I had a chocolate that felt and tasted much better than brown lard.
Before each of these big days I talked them over with my counsellor. He helped me to think ahead about my feelings, rationalise them and develop ways to cope. His support was invaluable and I would highly recommend getting help to come to terms with re-emerging post cancer. There are so many emotions and practicalities to navigate.
