Finding joy after cancer treatment: Debz story

To understand how I regained pleasure after my cancer diagnosis and subsequent gruelling year of treatment, you must understand one major concept.  I was a terrible cancer patient. 

Whilst social media was full of fundraisers for charity with cancer patients running marathons, swimming the channel or knitting cute teddies, I was sulking in my bed. I wasn’t getting dressed up for chemo and making jokes with the nurses, I was turning up in my trackies and ignoring everyone whilst watching Netflix, scrolling Instagram and disassociating.  I didn’t cut out sugar, I didn’t keep a gratitude journal and I certainly didn’t look on the time as a blessing in disguise. I hated every second of it.

Cancer was an uninvited houseguest. 

It had come into my beautiful home, thrown the furniture around, eaten my food and made a mess on the carpet and I was not going to say thank you. When you are in it, when the houseguest is stomping around, you feel like this is all you will ever know. Your house will never be yours again. The walls you painted, the pictures you hung, the memories you made will be forever tainted by the gremlin currently screaming at the top of its lungs. It is all you can hear, see, smell and it consumes every waking thought. The misery feels all consuming. I struggled to find joy in my children, my partner, my friends or any part of my life. The houseguest spoilt all of it. Spreading its stink and dirt, making everything feel grimy and different.

And then it was over.  The chemo was finished, my boobs had been lobbed into a hospital incinerator, and I’d been shot at with laser beams (or radiotherapy as the proper people called it).  An emotionless surgeon in a bland hospital consultation room told me the houseguest was gone. But there was a catch. It had a key, and it could return any time it wanted to. And if it did, that time it wouldn’t leave. 

All around me I was being told to rebuild that house. The core that had been so destroyed needed to be made whole again, but I just didn’t know how. I saw flashes of potential. Days out with my children, dinner with friends, holidays – all of them had sparkles of joy. But I could never forget the houseguest with its key. It overshadowed any sparkle, put out the spark before I could make it into a fire. I felt so hopeless and sad, like pleasure was something pre-cancer me enjoyed but would now forever be tainted.

That was until the Spice Girls.

On the 1st of June 2019, I went with my closest friends to see the Spice Girls on their reunion tour. I was tired, stressed and still having side effects from the year of treatment I’d endured but all of that was forgotten once the immortal words were sung.

‘I’ll tell you what I want, what I really really want’ I spent most of the concert crying and screaming the lyrics back at them. Dancing in my seat and awestruck by the dancers, fireworks, costume changes and incredible vocals. 

That night I learnt something about joy. It is an act of rebellion. We have been sold the idea that a happy life is an easy one, but that is untrue. Pleasure comes and goes, sometimes in tiny doses, and you need to hold onto those moments – they will sustain you. 

Choosing pleasure and joy means being brave.

That night I realised, I was alive. I was alive and seeing the Spice Girls and I was so happy I’d lived long enough for that to happen. Being alive meant I could be brave again and make the choice to embrace joy – chaos and all. Embracing the houseguest means no more hiding from it, rather, you need to grab it by the scruff of the neck and lock it in a room. Let it throw a tantrum, punch the walls, rip up the carpets, smash the windows – but only of that room. The rest of the house is yours to be filled with everything that gives you pleasure. 

For me that meant squeezing my babies really tight, going open water swimming with friends, lying on my nans lap whilst she stroked my hair, eating food that no longer tasted like metal, reading books, laughing. Having good sex again, allowing intimacy and not caring that my body, my house, was forever changed. Having no boobs meant no more summer tit sweat, no more sports bras at the gym and actually being looked in the eyes during conversations.

Sometimes I could still hear the screams of the houseguest, filling my brain with loud, chaotic fear until it was all I could think about. The antidote? The Spice Girls. As loud as you can, until your lungs ache. Until the screams stop and all you can remember is the pleasure.