When you sit across from that doctor who, with a pained look on his face, and 10 minutes of allotted time, tells you it’s bad, really bad, the worst type of bad… a few things happen. At least, in my experience, it goes something like this.

Number 1 (oh here we go again, I’ve seen Hamilton recently, and it appears this post [along with my every waking – and sleeping – thought] is being influenced. It’s also not the first time this has happened)
It triggers an immediate drop of the stomach, a tightening across the chest, and there comes the despair. Every fibre of your being wants it to be wrong. Fear takes hold and with it, comes a desperate need for reassurance…

Number 2
‘But there’s a plan, right?’
The answer can tip one of two ways. Leaning on a scale towards yes, or unfortunately, it hurtles towards no.
Some people say that from that first day of diagnosis, the world feels like it’s ending, right there, sitting in a room, perhaps alone (I was, why would I have taken someone along? It didn’t even cross my mind), listening to a stranger try to tell you your future. For me, it was a bit different. I felt that although it wasn’t an ideal thing to be hearing, the views of London from the hospital room were stunning, and I was heading on a new, albeit unplanned adventure. In fact, I was even going to write about it. And anyway, 29 year olds don’t die.

Number 3
The second time felt more serious. It was back. And within seconds, they were taking my eye and cheekbone, pulling out all the reconstructive work they’d done…
But then I’d be free… right?
The third time, they gave me the scary words I couldn’t get my head around… Inoperable, incurable… Things were just going to keep getting worse until… I died.

Number 4
I was going to die. I was actually going to die. How had I not realised that’s where this was going? No matter how prepared I thought I was: Will in place, ‘With The End in Mind’ read, convinced I’d feel a stillness, an acceptance, a calm feeling of resignation when it approached… that all went out the window when I was actually faced with the cold hard truth: I was going to die. And soon, apparently. That’s what the experts said, and experts know best, right?
Another chemo ordeal, hospitalisations every cycle, bald again… all to buy myself an unknown amount of time…
Which ended up only being 3 months.

Number 5
Aah, the arbitrary 3 month period between scans that all people with cancer know about.
Three months of antipodean visitors and swims and joy and pints and bottles of champagne at lunchtime on a Tuesday with people who light up my soul. But only 3 months. 3 months of freedom before the pain gets un-ignorable. Then unimaginable.

Number 6
Doctors saying over and over: this is it. The end is nigh. We have scarce few options and they’re rubbish anyway. There’s no hope. We need to make sure you don’t have this apparently dangerous thing we call ‘false hope’. So just to make sure, another time, and with feeling: you definitely don’t have any hope left, right?

Number 7
Friends die. One after another, the people met along the way succumb to the very thing that’s killing me. People who gave hope in their continued state of existence, people who get it… They thin until there are so few of us remaining, holding on by an ever fraying thread.

Number 8
There was the RT, of course, that they assured me wouldn’t work much, if it even did at all. But I pushed for it. I was having it, no matter how small the chance they gave it of it doing anything.
Mornings at the hospital having my face zapped, evenings finishing my album.
You see, when your mortality is dragged out and paraded around in front of your eyes, everything is pulled into sharp focus.

Number 9
A treatment plan means action. And action combined with rapidly closing time, prompts all the important things to float to the surface. The things you’re desperate to do, achieve and finish, drive your every waking thought. They burn inside, desperate to get done. I look back at that time and wonder how I did it, how I ever finished my album under those circumstances. But I also think it’s the best thing I could have done – radical remission #9: having strong reasons for living.
Reasons for living become more important, more in focus, when time is running out.
The low level chatter of life fades away and then it becomes clear what to spend any remaining time and energy on. I find this sits on a scale – the closer to the eye of the hurricane (you Hamilton fans still playing along?), the better we get at focusing only on what’s most important. It’s not uncommon to hear of people struggling more after they’re given the all clear or treatment finishes: What now?
Well for me, I write like I’m running out of time.
A desperate attempt to leave some sort of legacy – planting seeds in a garden you will never get to see…

Number 10
Fear grounds us in the small and the present. But it’s impossible to stay in survival/priority/vigilance mode forever, even if the threat never abates. The haste once felt starts to lessen, it’s time to rest and digest and process things… Somehow… But with it, we slip back into old ways, old patterns, old concerns, every day needs – the soul destroying job that pays the mortgage (if we’re able to work), people pleasing, putting things off.
The stoics believe it helps to keep in our minds, the shortness of life (and Seneca wrote a book titled exactly that). Lest we become, again, complacent after our brush with death.

I think it’s hard at times not to get caught up in everything that’s been lost, the things that have been unceremoniously taken away. At night as I lie awake, trying to ignore the thumping of my heart in my otherwise mostly deaf ear, it’s hard not to wonder what is enough. There’s a million things I haven’t yet done…

This question plagues me constantly. When will I know if I’ve done enough? Will I ever have done enough? What is enough? Sometimes it feels like I’m never satisfied. There’s always more to do, more things to create… I just need more time…

But just like that, 6 years has passed since that day I first heard those words, ‘it’s cancer’. Almost to the day, I realise as I write this.

In many ways I’m in the best place I’ve ever been. I’ve been stable now for nearly a year (wow). I had that emergency MRI on Sunday (with Mum and Clarence holding my hands), but the pain I had a few weeks ago, when I had that fever, has completely receded back to normal levels. So I’m not bothered. The MRI will say no change, and it’ll be back to waiting three months until the next one, or until I get new pain, whatever comes first. I’m banking on the former. The constant vigilance is exhausting, but I choose not to focus on it.

So while ‘they’ might say the time for me to dream is gone, I think we’ve all decided now that we’re not going to believe them, are we. I watch my conventional medical team’s face crumple into some weird sort of look of pity and despair and… anger? when I tell them I’ve decided I’m not going to die. They think I’m being flippant, they thing I’m in denial, they fear I’ve got (gasp) false hope… But they’re not the only people I have to rely on anymore. I figure anything someone else has achieved is evidence of what’s possible for me, and I’ve taken a lot of things into my own hands, removing the power from those who no longer believe in me (more on this to come in a later post, backed by popular demand).

I wrote recently about deciding to give myself back a future. So I will leave you with some of my dreams, and I dare you to make a list of your own:

• Adopting a one-eyed cat, with the opposite eye to me, who I will name Fred Astaire. (Don’t ask me why. I also dream of then adopting a ginger kitten to be Fred Astaire’s bestie, and naming it Ginger Rogers. Their sex is unimportant, and they will both be referred to by their full names only)
• Being strong and fit and healthy (forevermore) and very capable of going to India in a few months with Mum and friends
• My novel making it onto the bestseller list (finally to be published in the next couple of months – it’s been a long adventure, that one, but I can’t wait to finally share it with you)
• Having Rosa narrate the audiobook of aforementioned book
• Spending a month abroad every Spring
• Performing Marlborough Hill. With an Orchestra. At the Albert Hall. Why not.
• Releasing a podcast (recorded with my bestie Katie, which I am currently editing)

It’s fun to dream. We used to daydream when we were young, it was such a natural thing to do, imagining all sorts of wild and wonderful things, and I think many of us have lost that. So as well as choosing to allow ourselves a (rich and joyful and fulfilling) future, let’s also give ourselves permission to dream big: write a list and read it often so that you never forget your capacity to dream. And be bold, because life’s too short to play it small.

If anyone comes across a one eyed cat that needs adopting, please do let me know.