Relationships.

The years that have followed since my diagnosis, my relapse, my transplant… not a single day has passed by where cancer hasn’t crossed my mind in some way.

Sometimes it’s big. Sometimes it’s barely noticeable. 

A passing thought, a feeling, a memory that catches me off guard. 

It’s always there, woven neatly into the background of my life.

But in the immediate aftermath of it all, there wasn’t much time to sit with any of that, because as soon as we found ourselves back in Northern Ireland, we were launched straight into COVID.

For so many people, that period became one of the hardest and most painful times of their lives. Friends and family kept apart. Rules and restrictions dictating everyday life. Loved ones saying goodbye behind closed doors. It was a kind of heartbreak none of us had seen before.

But for me, if I’m honest, it gave me exactly what I needed.

It gave me the isolation to recover without guilt. Time to rebuild, to rest, to let my body and mind try to catch up with everything they’d been through. It gave me space to reconnect with normal life, or whatever version of normal existed at that point. And, maybe most importantly, it gave me time with Ben.

Before cancer, we’d been used to the ordinary yet blissfully happy routine of being together. Seeing each other every day. Waking up beside each other. Falling asleep knowing we’d have tomorrow. Little routines that don’t feel remarkable until they’re suddenly taken from you.

And then, almost overnight, all of that had disappeared.

When I got sick, our relationship was forced to exist in fragments. 

Hospital wards. Charity accommodation. Stolen hours when I wasn’t too exhausted, too sore, too sick, too overwhelmed, or too anxious to be away from the safety of my mum for too long.

For two years, we rarely got the chance to just be us. Not patient and visitor. Not sick me and worried him. Just us.

So, as strange as it sounds, COVID gave us some of that back.

And honestly, it was perfect. Well… perfect-ish.

If you ignore the hospital check-ups, the constant low-level fear of infection, and that one spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to get to Dublin, which ended with us making it as far as Belfast before I had such a major panic attack that Ben had to turn the car around and take me home again.

But even with all of that, I was grateful. Grateful that the most brutal part of my treatment was behind me. Because even now, I still can’t imagine what it must have been like for people going through active cancer treatment during that time, cut off from their families, their partners, their support systems, and the people who made the unbearable feel just about survivable.

And I’m not naive enough to say that love, support and a positive mindset can cure cancer. They can’t.

But my God, they matter.

They matter when your body is failing you.

They matter when your mind is spiralling.

They matter when you are frightened, exhausted, angry, grieving, or just too worn down to keep pretending you’re coping.

Without my mum and dad, without Ben and his family, without my friends and wider family showing up, helping out, sitting beside me, cheering me on, or simply refusing to let me disappear into the darkness of it all… I genuinely don’t know where I would be now.

They carried me through more of it than they’ll probably ever realise.

But as I've said before, cancer also has a way of showing you people clearly. And not always in the ways you’d hope.

Some friendships quietly disappeared under the weight of it all. Not always through cruelty, but through discomfort, distance, and the simple fact that not everyone knows how to stay when life gets hard and ugly and frightening.

Could some of those relationships have been saved if we’d all understood each other better? If we’d made more room for each other’s fear, confusion, grief and limitations?

Maybe. I don’t know.

But there were other instances that felt harder to excuse.

Because during that time, I also found out that someone I’d grown up alongside, someone I thought would care a little more than they did, had been caught in a lie. A lie about having cancer.

And what I couldn't understand was the why of it all.

Because why would anyone choose that story?

Why would anyone willingly take on the language of fear and pain, knowing full well what it actually costs the people living it, not to mention their loved ones?

They knew I was going through this, as well as the people around them.

They knew the pain, the hurt, the worry, and the fear we all felt.

So were they really just that selfish? Did they really think it was okay?

Because when you’ve been on the other side of cancer, when you’ve sat in wards and treatment rooms and watched people cry out in pain, watched bodies fail, watched fear hollow families out from the inside, watched people cling to life with everything they have left… it stops being a sad story people vaguely understand from a distance.

It becomes real. Brutally, painfully, devastatingly real.

You see people so unwell you genuinely don’t know if they’ll still be there the next morning.

You see parents, partners, siblings and best friends trying to hold themselves together in corridors and side rooms and hospital car parks.

You see the kind of suffering that changes people forever.

And no one who has truly witnessed that could ever understand why somebody would choose to fake it.

I’ve learnt a lot from cancer.

What it takes. What it leaves behind. And the impact it has on everyone around you.

And not just the big, obvious things either.

Not just the hospital appointments, the medication, the fear, or the trauma of it all.

But the way it changes how people love you.

The way it changes how you love them back.

And the way it can make some people step up in ways you never expected, and others let you down in ways you never quite get over.

And you never forget.