Still waiting with bated breath for the biopsy results but they haven’t arrived by late afternoon so undeterred off I go for my holiday highlights at the hairdressers. While I’m under the heat lamp with half my head wrapped in little bits of foil my GP phones me with the results.
Cancer in the lymph node and pre cancerous cells in the Thryoid. I can’t say I’m surprised. It feels a bit like Groundhog Day – the same GP had to give me similar news six months ago. I had to feel some sympathy for her having to be the bearer of bad tidings all over again.
I tell her how bad the timing is – I’m off on holiday in three days and I’ll be away for a month. Then she delivers the killer blow and shatters my holiday dreams. “Are you sure you’ll be going, Sam?” she asks. She says she doesn’t know enough about this type of cancer to interpret all the pathology but she’s pretty certain that I’m going to need more surgery and sooner rather than later.
Shock is a weird thing, hey? There I am under a heat lamp with my hair in foils looking like a metallic alien and all I want to do is throw my toys out of the pram about my holiday. I’m not thinking about Cancer or surgery or treatment, I’m thinking about all my friends, family and all the plans we’ve been making for almost a year. Not happy. Not happy at all.
David comes and meets me at the hairdresser and pays the bill, what a bonus! Then we go home open a bottle of fine red wine and ring our parents. There’s nothing worse than getting bad news than having to give said bad news to someone else. Especially someone else who loves you. That is the most gut wrenching part about it. Instead of telling our folks I have a clean bill of health, we have to tell them I have cancer. Worse still, for me anyway, instead of telling them see you in a few days, we have to tell them we aren’t coming home. Not for a while at least. That is the part the sucks the most.
