So a week ago today my world got turned upside down. My husband and best friend has inoperable cancer. As most of you know this has come as a complete shock. I had driven him to a and e a few weeks before as I thought he was having a stroke. He had lost sensation in his left hand a couple of days before Halloween, but it was when we were doing our trail in the woods on Halloween that I noticed something was wrong. He was speaking but I couldn’t work out a word he was saying. We returned home and I told him to call 111, but thinking of the family first he said he would do so in the morning as the kids were in bed.
Anyway when I dropped him off at Mk a and e I thought I would be driving back over to collect him a few hours later, maybe a trapped nerve or something. But when he messaged to say he had to stay in as they had found an anomaly and I was allowed to see him in a and e I knew something more sinister was going on. A week on, lots of tests, we were still none the wiser. Things suspected but not confirmed. So as you can imagine when we were sitting in the oncologist room a week ago today we were not expecting things to be as bad as they are. Once we were referred to the cancer centre we knew the biopsies had showed cancer in the bowel. But we thought the query still remained with the anomaly in the brain and bowel cancer can be removed and treated right? But they confirmed it had spread to the brain and that it was inoperable. A very rare situation according to dr Saka. In his words Chris has been extremely “unlucky”. We were shocked, confused and just down right stunned. He kept asking if we had any questions, but how could we? We were just utterly overwhelmed and confused. I cried, Chris didn’t show any emotion. We were then rushed to the clinical oncologist who quickly got Chris to sign a piece of paper to ok future radiation. Instructing us and getting Chris to confirm he understood. But we were in shock. It was only after that we were put into a room by ourselves and our McMillan nurse made us a cup of coffee. Chris asked me to call his mum to tell her, he couldn’t do it. That was the worst phone call I have ever had to make.
We left the cancer centre and I asked Chris where he would like to go. He wanted to go to kfc. There I was balling my eyes out driving through kfc in Milton Keynes getting him a box meal. The poor server must have thought I was nuts.
We had a couple of days to try and process things, but things just felt “normal”. How can he be this seriously ill? He’s had no symptoms other than the hand and the speech. Only looking back now I can see hints of other things which you would just put down to stress. Changes in mood, upset tummy etc.
I can’t accept it just yet, not ready to. We have to face the biggest fight of our lives and I’m not ready to think about what will happen if god forbid we are defeated. Chris is strong and he has a whole life to live. I will be by his side through this whole journey, I’m his wife and the mother of his children. We will fight this together for our family.