Long story short, when I went home from Uni at Easter, my Dad picked me up from work one evening. This is unheard of for my Dad. On the car journey home he told me that over the past couple of months, my Mum hadn't been very well and it had reached a point where an intervention was needed and she badly needed to seek medical help. This through me off guard and I was a bit worried/concerned/confused, but I wasn't feeling any extreme emotions because me being naive, I hadn't realised the true seriousness of the situation. In brief, my Mum had been losing a lot of blood, and I didn't realise how much or how badly it had affected her as I wasn't around to witness it.
Fast foward a few weeks and a few tests later; the conclusion was that my Mum had an abnormal cyst on her ovaries but the cause of the bleeding was from her womb. Shadows and linings showed up in an ultrasound which then led to her having a biopsy. That's when it hit me. At first, I totally overreacted and was bracing myself on how to cope with life after my Mum's death. (ridiculous, I know). My Mum of all people, was the one to console me and bring me back down to Earth to deal with the situation logically. We still don't have the biopsy results, but some more scans and blood tests results have come back and it's looking pretty positive that whatever it is making my Mum ill, it's not cancer. I don't want to get my hopes up, but I am so grateful.
This whole situation has taught me so much and opened up my eyes to what other people are going through. I cannot physically explain how scared I was feeling when for those couple of weeks it looked like a cancer diagnosis was heading my Mum's way. So I can't even begin to imagine how other people and their families are feeling when they hear that news. Even just today, so many people will have been given a cancer diagnosis and will be experiencing all the emotions I felt and more, and on a much larger scale. I care for cancer patients and witness what they themselves and their families are going through and I always thought I had a good idea of the emotional pain they're in. I was wrong. I had no idea. It's one of those things you don't fully understand until you're directly affected by it. And I haven't even been directly affected, I was just one step closer than I used to be.
