rivers2cross

On this day 10 years ago, Mum had the operation to remove the tumour from her bowel. It was a lovely late summers / early autumn day as you can see from the photo I took whilst walking the dogs at work. This was the first of five major operations that Mum was to have, and there was little any of us could do on that day, other than wait for news from the hospital. The news when it came in the evening was good news as the operation had been a success.

I look back on that day and indeed on much of the period of Mum’s illness and realise just how little I knew about cancer. Treatment, staging, secondary cancer these were terms I came to know, but still didn’t associate them with Mum. We just navigated each hurdle as they came. All Mum wanted to do each time the cancer came back was to get back to her normal life as quickly as possible and she did this incredibly well.

It was also around this time that the first seeds of my fundraising began to grow. Ignoring the fact that she still needed treatment for the nodules on her lung, I chose to support Beating Bowel Cancer, because as far as I was concerned Mum had beaten bowel cancer. Not long after this operation I began putting together my first book, Beating Bowel Cancer.

In some ways it seems like this was all a lifetime ago, and yet some of the memories from this period are still very vivid and feel so recent x