This Bowel Cancer Awareness Month, our Trustee and founder of EDNERAT, Natasha de Teran, shares a personal and powerful reflection on her experience - four years on from a life-changing diagnosis.
Trustee, Natasha, shares personal experience during Bowel Cancer Awareness Month
I am writing this almost to the day that I was given my diagnosis – bowel, cancer stage 3, maybe stage 4.
It is now four years on – and yet the delivery of that deafening diagnosis looms so large in my memory that it still feels like yesterday.
I imagine and selfishly hope that it always will do so, because only something equally terrible and terrifying could replace it.
And yet – although it took a few nerve-wracking months before something could be done to attack my cancer; and despite the ensuing months of miserable, mind-numbing drugs, a further two operations and waits and scans and worry – mine really wasn’t so terrible. Terrifying yes, at the time, but no, not so terrible.
I was one of the lucky ones.
My cancer burst (quite literally) onto the scene, seemingly coming out of nowhere. I was weak yes. I had funny bowel habits. Perhaps I looked a bit grey and felt washed out and suffered from some occasional bloating. But I was a middle-aged woman – what was unusual in any of that?
Nothing I thought, until with the most excruciating, agonizing pains I was rushed to A&E. An emergency operation saw a large chunk of bowel and the offending obstruction removed.
That agony – that spirit-stripping pain – that was the bell that saved me from worse, the stoma I was given in its place, the pain’s helpful accomplice. I wouldn’t wish that pain on anyone, but gosh I was lucky that this hitherto silent intrusion decided to erupt so violently onto the scene that to ignore it was not possible.
I was one of the lucky ones.
Like many of those whose chances lead to their survival, there is life before cancer and life after cancer. I measure time and my achievements to and from that date. My life is different now in innumerable ways – how I think about and measure time, what I do, who and what I prioritise and who and what I care about; what I don’t prioritise and don’t care about. How I think about chance and odds and health. Oh gosh, I prize health.
Cancer’s toll is a heavy one and yet it weighs differently on each and every one of us. As I was muddling through the treatments, it took my mother. Since then, a former colleague and a close neighbour have been taken by it, and now a good friend is being cruelly tormented by it. Cancer steals lives and it changes them. And yet it also conjures unimaginably deep wells of strength and stamina – not just from the victims, but also from those around them – from those that help and those that sit beside; those that treat and those that comfort.
I found I needed that strength and stamina as much in the aftermath as I did at the time of treatment.
Recovering from cancer is magnificent, enormous, insurmountable – an unearnt privilege, randomly awarded. After cancer, exhausted and emotionally fragile, a bit uncertain after a long period of apathy, feeling oh so grateful, a good bit guilty and a lot more alone, it’s time for the patient to stand up strong, to embrace and rejoin life. That testing period of a time is a tricky one – every moment aware of the privilege, the sacrifices, the helping hands that gave, the things we couldn’t do, the time that passed. But this too passes and life resurfaces, reshaped, rethought, rekindled.
Thank you, everyone.
