Marked & measured.

Dublin. A city I should have loved, but never quite understood.

On paper, it had everything I admired. Literary greats immortalised in plaques and pubs. Cobbled streets worn smooth by countless visitors. A familiar sharpness in the people, the same quick wit and dry humour I recognised from home.

But beneath that, it felt restless. Busy. Dirty. Rundown.

Ben loved it. The history tucked into every corner, the coffee shops that took their craft far too seriously, the Guinness poured just right. We’d been before, more than once, and each time I tried to see it through his eyes, but I never quite managed, and knew that living there for the next few months certainly wouldn’t change this.

Once the Dublin team gave the green light for my transplant, everything moved quickly. 

I was given a date for admission to St. James’s Hospital. Our accommodation for the months ahead was confirmed. And a Hickman line was inserted – three ports instead of the two of a PICC line – a small but unmistakable marker that this phase was different.

When we arrived, I was admitted to the Denis Burkitt ward, the country’s national bone marrow transplant unit. The team was kind in that quiet, practised way that comes from doing this every day. The hospital felt unfamiliar, its rhythms and routines strange to me, but it was still an improvement on Belfast and 10 North.

I felt ready. Or at least, as ready as someone could be to face what came next.

This was the final hurdle. The last stretch.

The only thing left was to wipe me clean.

The original plan had been high-intensity chemotherapy. Brutal, but accepted. However, because I was young, the team decided at the last minute to include total body irradiation as well.

In theory, I welcomed it. I wanted everything they could throw at me. I wanted no corners cut, no regrets later about what might have been done differently. I needed to believe that when this was over, we had exhausted every possible defence against it ever returning.

But radiation came with a caveat. If there was any chance of having children left, this would certainly zap it away.

For me, it seemed fertility had become a cruel game of contradiction. I’d had the same conversation over and over, each time with a different ending. One doctor would tell me it was still possible. The next would gently, or sometimes not so gently, take it back.

Shortly after my relapse, before beginning treatment for the second time, I was sent to see a fertility specialist in Belfast. 

The appointment was hopeless from the start, as what the consultant hadn’t realised – what no one had thought to brief her on –was that I’d already been through treatment before.

So she spoke optimistically. About options. About egg freezing. About timelines and procedures that no longer applied to me.

And while I knew it was impossible, and that my previous treatment had already closed that door, I sat there smiling, nodding like a fool.

I was listening to a future I already knew could never be mine.

I guess it felt easier than interrupting her. Easier than explaining that she’d got it all wrong. That I’d missed my chance long ago. Because what twenty-three-year-old, on a whim, decides to freeze her eggs?

In Dublin, though, after a few meetings with my new team, I was given something I hadn’t felt in a while: a thin, dangerous kind of hope. There were stories of young stem cell patients who had gone on to conceive naturally. Exceptions. Outliers. Miracles that lived as cheerful anecdotes.

I held onto those stories carefully, not wanting to let them grow too large – my head, and my heart, couldn’t survive being let down again.

This, unfortunately, turned out to be the right decision, as a few weeks before admission, my consultant confirmed that radiation would be part of my treatment.

And having met with the radiation consultant, there was no hesitation, no hedging, no gentle language. She simply confirmed:

You’ll never get pregnant naturally.

And just like that, a future I already knew was fragile and full of ifs and buts, was taken from me. Not dramatically. Not unkindly. But definitively.

So, in six sessions spread across three days – one in the morning and one in the evening – I lay on the radiation bed as nurses positioned me with blocks. Measuring and then re-measuring. Aligning me with a precision that felt both reassuring and impersonal.

The room was cold. The bed hard beneath me. My arms placed just so, as my body was arranged into something clinical and compliant.

They stepped back behind thick glass, voices crackling through speakers, and then there was nothing. No pain. No sensation. Just the knowledge that something irreversible was happening inside me.

I wanted it to feel more dramatic. Heat. Burning. Some obvious signs that my body was being altered. Instead, there was only the hum of the machine and the sound of my own breathing.

Lying there, I wondered how many other parts of me were being erased along with the leukaemia and my ability to become a mum. Which losses would announce themselves later? Years later. In moments when I least expected them.

The machine powered down.

The nurses returned.

The blocks were removed.

And I stood up, intact on the outside, forever altered within.