My wife has amazing resilience, and was determined to recover quickly from the mother of all operations. After only a few days in intensive care, she was moved to a normal private room, and within a few more days was up and walking.
It would be tough for her to get back to full strength, but she was sent home earlier than we expected. I had resorted to driving back and forth to the hospital as I wanted the children to have some sense of normality, but I was knackered with it all. The motorway had constant roadworks, I was in work for a few hours, and it wasn’t good to be driving so much. Not something I wanted to do again (little did I know).
But the drive home was something else – an unexpected joy. It was also the third most careful drive I have ever done, after bringing my children home from hospital.
Of course, the news that they had been successful helped our mood, and we could now settle for a stint of recuperation, and hopefully normality.
The rest of 2017 was spent doing just that, and we even managed to get away as a family later that summer, but always having to be aware of how she was. We had a big party, mainly to celebrate life, and moved house – wanting to get all the stress in one year! Our daughter started secondary school – I am always amazed at how she coped with everything going on.
And then to 2018. Unfortunately, I have learnt with cancer that nothing ever stays the same. We found that the tumours had returned quicker than we hoped. Surgery was out of the question, but now a new line of treatment was available. And so we entered the world of immunotherapy.