Relapse

Coming home meant starting over with a new team of strangers in white coats - consultants, nurses, social workers - none of whom knew me or my quirks. Laurel House quickly became my safe place, a rhythm of bloods, tea breaks, and steady reassurance.

It was supposed to be another routine check at Laurel House - bloods, a plaster, then home in time for dinner. Instead, I ended up sobbing in reception, clinging to my mum’s hand as Dr Aaron performed a bone marrow biopsy.

I thought it was just an anomaly, a blip in my blood results. Instead, it was the start of another fight - one that would depend on a stranger’s cells to save my life.

For one week, I pretended things were normal. I carried my fears close and waited for it all to begin again. But when the week ended, I was standing outside Belfast City Hospital - bag in hand, staring up at its horrid yellow facade. Inside waited 10 North.

You haven’t known humility until you’ve been wheelchaired two feet from the toilet to your bed while a nurse tries to keep a straight face. A short journey, but an unforgettable one.

What started as something strange and harmless quickly turned into another round of scans and whispered concerns. The results were clear, but in hospitals, relief never lasts long - and “just to be certain” is never as comforting as it sounds.

It was only supposed to be a precaution. A quick test, a little discomfort, maybe a Coke afterwards. But when the consultant asked Mum and me to step into a private room, I knew that precaution had become something else entirely.

I never met her, but her story reached me when I needed it most. In a ward full of silence and exhaustion, she reminded me what courage really looks like - the kind that keeps showing up, even when life doesn’t play fair.

Midnight brought bonfires across the city, smoke rising into gold. But under the hospital’s cold lights, I could only feel the weight of stillness — and the fear that my fire might be next to fade.

There are days I have no memory of. Conversations, visitors, whole pieces of my life lost to the haze.

You try to hold on to whatever control you can, but cancer has a talent for taking it piece by piece. By the time the commode rolled in, the illusion was long gone.

From the outside, it looked like depression. Inside, it was anger and exhaustion stitched together by fear. I didn’t want advice or optimism - I just wanted out. But every day the answer stayed the same: not today.

Life didn’t become worse or better - it just went on. Days blurred together, counted in blood results and obs checks, with little to separate one from the next.

I’d learned not to celebrate progress too loudly. Every time things seemed to move forward, something surfaced to pull them back again. This time was no different.

They told me it would take a week. One small cut, one long wait, and the understanding that everything depended on what came back.