13th...unlucky for some, but not me because I’m 13 days into borrowed time.

January this year I was told the Chemo hadn’t worked, the cancer had spread aggressively during treatment and I had ‘months’ to live. For some reason the actual time span of ‘months’ hadn’t registered until I asked if I could take my son to Las Vegas for his birthday in May. Dr Emma’s eyes welled up and she told me May was too late! I was either going to be too unwell or dead by then! May!! That was only 4 months away! That couldn’t be right! They’d made a mistake! Maybe I moved during the P.E.T scan and the image was grainy. Hang on, I know, its buttons! I must have had buttons on my clothes when they scanned me. Four months!! What do you do when you’ve only got four months to live!

My bucket list consisted of places to see and food to eat. I wanted to drink wine in Italy and stuff my face with pasta, see blossom trees in Japan and eat sushi, ribs at a rodeo in Texas and hot chocolate by a fireplace in Aspen. But even that had been taken away from me because now I wasn’t allowed to fly! Apparently the combination of chemotherapy and melanoma put me at high risk of blood clots not to mention the difficulty I would have getting travel insurance. If they covered the cancer it would cost me a fortune and if they didn’t and something happened they would somehow link it to the cancer and it would cost me a fortune. So that put pay to the travel part of my bucket list. Did I mention I don’t like being told what I can and can’t do?

As it turned out I went into ‘tie up loose ends’ mode. I made a list on my iphone and starting checking them off one by one. In a weird way it was like getting ready for moving house or going on a holiday but instead of packing my suitcase and remembering my passport it was organising things so that Joe and Mum didn’t have to. Finishing things that I’d started. I had cross stitches that were unfinished, Joes baby album hadn’t been updated since he was seven (he’s now 15), my wardrobe needed sorting of all the clothes that ‘one day I’ll fit back into’ because one day wasn’t coming. I just wanted to clear out everything that I wasn’t using because this would save mum the painful job when I was gone. I started writing a journal for Joe with little snip-its to help him through life and listing the things that were in my keepsake box so that he would know what they were and the story behind them.

On top of those seemingly menial tasks were the serious depressing ones. A couple of days after I’d seen Dr Emma at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford, I went and saw one of the nurses at the Charles Clore Unit at Newbury Hospital. I was introduced to the Charles Clore Unit when the cancer first came back in 2008. I felt like I needed moral support and in a way it was therapeutic to be surrounded by others that had cancer. Talking about it openly without getting puppy dog eyes was great but when they started dying one by one it made it all too realistic and I stopped going. I had a gut feeling I hadn’t seen the end of my battle with cancer but I felt it wasn’t going to kill me and I was going to beat it. I was trying so hard to stay positive and was so torn between what I felt and what I was being told. Maybe the guys that had died also felt strongly about beating it, but having them dying was shaking my belief and I wasn't feeling so positive anymore.

So here I was, back at the Charles Clore but this time I was one of the ones that were going to die. That was when the palliative care ball started to roll! My nurse helped me organise appointments with a palliative care doctor, district nurses, Macmillan nurses...the list went on. I didn’t realise there were so many people I needed to see. It was still all a bit surreal though because deep down I still couldn’t believe I was going to die.