Free The Cancer Survivors Club by Chris Geiger

exhausted. I’d never felt so tired in my life!
    Soon, other symptoms surfaced in addition to the constant aching and tiredness. Every time I went to the toilet, I got intense pains; they were so severe I’d have to stop. This was obviously very worrying and I tried to push it to the back of my mind. I just wanted to spend time with Freddie at home being the perfect mummy.
    Freddie was doing all the things he should for his age, but I felt like I was letting him down. The doctors were still looking into my continued blood loss. I had to endure endless tests, including an endoscopy, scan and a colonoscopy, but they found nothing. I kept being told different things. First it was Coeliac disease, then Crohn’s and then it was something else.
    We still managed to go away on holiday. We hired a campervan enabling us to take Freddie with us everywhere we went. We’d even decided to run off to Gretna Green and get married. This was going to be our secret until I was admitted to hospital two days before for yet another blood transfusion. I had to tell the doctors I needed to be discharged by Friday as we’d arranged to get married on the Saturday. This kind of killed the romance a bit.
    In October, I had another colonoscopy with lots of sedation this time, as the first attempt had been so painful I didn’t let them have much of a look. On a big screen next to me, I watched as the consultant discovered a strange-looking lump. I was really nervous and kept laughing a lot. I was enjoying the haze of sedation as I pointed and asked, ‘Ha ha, what’s that?’ Then I continued looking as she struggled with pincers to snip off a small piece of what I later found out was a tumour.
    It transpired poor Freddie didn’t have much room to develop inside me because he’d been forming next to a tumour. I had both life and death growing inside me – an awful thought. Because of this, Freddie took some nutrients but the tumour took most. When I think about it even now, I struggle to understand why this evil disease decided to grow next to my beautiful baby and am amazed how my body coped.
    The week after being told I had cancer was one of the hardest of my life, waiting to hear if it had spread or not. Because of this, frustratingly, I’d not been able to start any treatment and I still felt so ill and constantly tired. It was equally disturbing having to see my family doing their best to hide their emotions. I knew what some people might have thought; I was only twenty-seven and had a six-month-old baby boy.
    I was finally diagnosed with secondary bowel cancer, which would need surgery and chemotherapy.
    I was so pleased and happy they had finally found the cause of my problems and could begin treating me.
    I felt at my worst when I went into hospital for the operation to have the lump removed. The ‘Nil by Mouth’ sign posted above my bed reminding staff I wasn’t to eat anything didn’t help. I’d also had to take some laxatives the night before to make sure my bowels were empty. I was at the lowest weight I’d been since I was a child. My red blood count was now just six, half of what it should have been. This meant I needed more blood before they would operate on me. I was feeling so worried and depressed and wondered if I’d even survive the operation. The excitement of them finding the cancer had rapidly eroded.
    When I eventually woke from the surgery, I was violently sick. It was a horrible feeling but thankfully a Macmillan nurse had organized a private side room enabling me to be with Freddie. When I touched my side where the pain had always been, I felt nothing; it was such a big relief. Instantly, I realized the lump had been cut out. I knew whatever came next didn’t matter; I was going to do my best to survive.
    As soon as I started to recover from the operation, I began a course of chemotherapy. Mum again kept me company every day and looked after my