Losing control.

Nine weeks. 

That’s how long I spent in Belfast City Hospital for my second round of treatment.

63 days. 

Of ups, downs, and so much more in between.

1512 hours. 

To think. To fear. To analyse every detail of what was happening to me.

When I was moved from ICU back to 10 North, I felt weaker than ever. It was also the first time I’d seen myself in a mirror in a week, and the person staring back at me wasn’t someone I recognised.

Pale face, sunken eyes, hair that looked dull and forgotten. And my neck… still carrying the line and its tangle of ports.

Thankfully, I could barely stand long enough to really take myself in. My legs were now half the size I remembered, trembling from the effort of simply being upright.In ICU, I hadn’t wanted to believe how unwell I’d been, but the weakness didn’t lie. I felt it in everything I tried to do.

Proper showers became impossible without my mum’s help, and washing my hair might as well have been a luxury reserved for another lifetime. What made it worse was that my room didn’t have a private bathroom, so I had to drag my tired body to the shared toilet and washroom – a process that left me exhausted, despite being all of five steps away.

However, after watching my tragic shuffles to the loo, the nurses eventually took pity and rolled in one evening with a commode. 

By that point I’d already accepted that dignity wasn’t part of the deal anymore, but the commode still caught me off guard. It carried a kind of quiet humiliation I wasn’t ready for. 

My only relief? At least I was in a private room.

Others weren’t always so lucky – made to use their commodes in the company of people they’d only known a short time. And while it was hard for the rest of us to ignore, we all knew it was far worse for the person behind the curtain doing their business.

Because, one of the most difficult challenges you face when you’re told you have cancer isn’t the cancer itself, it’s the loss of control that comes with it. 

Control of your body. 

Control of your health. 

Control of your entire future.

Your body turns against you. Your health is placed in the hands of others. And your future… well, you just have to hope.

So you try to hold onto whatever parts of yourself you can. You try to maintain some sense of control, no matter how small it might be. And for most of us, we want to hold on to at least some aspect of our dignity.

For me, I made light of the situations that had potential to harm that control, brushing them off as if they were nothing.

I laughed and smiled and joked my way through moments that should have had me blushing in shame.

But there’s only so much a person can take. There’s only so much you can store away in the darkest vaults of your mind, because eventually the weight of it all becomes too much to hold, and the fragile control you thought you still had shatters along with everything else.

That second round of treatment. The leukaemia moving to my central nervous system. The passing of Eimear. Infection after infection. ICU. The stranger I was seeing in the mirror. The commode standing beside my bed like the punchline to the joke my life had turned into…

I don’t believe in using words like win or lose when it comes to cancer, because people don’t win or lose with an illness like this.

But in those moments, it felt like cancer was winning, control was nowhere to be found, and my strength? Apparently I still had it.

Or so everyone liked to tell me.