Piecing your life back together after a cancer diagnosis.

Blood Cancer Uncensored is pleased to support the international #thisisbloodcancer campaign. Please consider sharing your story of what blood cancer means to you. This can be in text or video format. Email us on bloodcanceruncensored@gmail.com for a chance to be featured on our site. Today El shares her diagnosis story.

The words that nobody ever wants to write, yet on the 18^thJune 2020 I received possibly the worst phone call of my life. 

I was diagnosed with cancer.

It seemingly came out of nowhere. One day I found a lump in my neck – around 50p size in diameter – that I thought would be something to do with my glands (having had glandular fever when I was younger) or even from sleeping funny. Fast forward a few weeks and a few lumps later, I was hanging up the phone, shell shocked and lost for words. Turns out, however, no words are needed when you’re waiting on a biopsy test. I ran down to my family, shook my head, and started crying, and that’s where the cancer journey started. 

Funnily enough, I found my journal from when the first Covid-19 lockdown started, and I had been complaining of constant headaches and tiredness all the way through April – makes you wonder when the cancer actually did start.

I felt fortunate to have gone straight into treatment during a global pandemic, especially after watching the BBC Panorama episode “Britain’s Cancer Crisis”. Nevertheless, getting the (original) Big C during the pandemic was tough. I was 21 at the time, just moved back from my year abroad in Spain, back living with my parents – potentially the best position to be in to handle the torturous months ahead – yet I faced the diagnosis, the treatment and most of the appointments alone. 

It didn’t seem to phase me that much at the time, I put my brave face on and told the world that “El Wood ain’t a quitter”, because what else was I supposed to do?

However, in retrospect, I just wasn’t processing it all. I’d gone from thinking I’d either had a glandular fever flare up or some weird unseen Covid symptom and being told it couldn’t be lymphoma after all blood tests came back fine, to having a PET-scan to gauge the severity of my cancer and starting chemo. All within a month. 

It’s a lot to handle. 

Think about all the possible worries you could have about your future life and then ramp it up a good few notches. Fertility, relationships, disability, insurance, university, a career… death. These massive pieces of the puzzle that make up your life all become distorted in a matter of moments and suddenly nothing fits how it used to.

And so, understandably, it takes time to patch up the puzzle, with coping mechanisms, with friends and family and support, with laughter, with milestones and even with grief. They start to come together and form a new puzzle, and you start to see the bigger picture and it becomes easier to navigate your feelings. You’re aware it’s fragile, you hold on to those really beautiful pieces, and you become less concerned with forcing in things that don’t fit, like unsupportive friends or that event you’ve been dreading. Good puzzles are worth taking time over and after a cancer diagnosis, it’s important to find space to process everything and slowly discover what your new big picture is. 

*PS, this puzzle analogy is not entirely mine. I recently watched an episode of Daniel Sloss’ comedy show on Netflix “Jigsaw” and he talks about this analogy of seeing life like a jigsaw puzzle, I highly recommend it. I’ve simply adjusted it as I found it really resonated with how I felt after my cancer diagnosis.

My video interview

Here I am being interviewed by Adrian Warnock:

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