5 months no blog. Still alive, don’t worry 🙋🏻‍♀️

When I started this, sat in hospital In Manchester having just been diagnosed with a massive brain tumour and not knowing what the heck to do with myself, it was such great therapy for me. To get my thoughts out of my head – it helped me so much and I became quite the regular poster if you remember! I loved having the feeling of an army of you guys behind me, essentially going through it all with me. It made me feel less alone and that was just what I needed. But then as it got closer to Christmas and I got closer to finishing radiotherapy, something changed. There were thousands of people reading the blogs each time I posted and 9,000 + people watching it all unfold on TikTok too. And I didn’t like it. Through trying to raise as much awareness as I could about brain tumours and the importance of regular eye tests, I’d forgotten that at the end of the day this was just my life that I still had to live everyday. But it felt like a soap opera now. And the blog was always so organic before, that it didn’t feel right to carry on writing when I didn’t want to. So I stopped as that felt like the right thing to do – and it was! I didn’t feel like I needed all the reassurance anymore and just wanted to move on, finish radiotherapy and forget any of this ever happened.

But it turns out, you can’t – and that maybe this stupid situation is just here to mess with my head (lol, literally) forever more.

I finished radiotherapy in January, walked out of there with my super hero mask and rang the absolute shit out of that Christie bell. I’d done 33 intense treatments of radiotherapy to my brain and sat strapped to that bed everyday by my face and SURVIVED. My mum, dad, Oll and the kids were all there to see me ring the bell, and they’re the only ones I needed there at that moment. My little family. In all seriousness, radiotherapy isn’t THAT bad. I hope no one reading this ever needs to test my theory but honestly, it’s not as awful as it’s made out to be. I give the fact that you have to go to the Christie everyday a strong 0/10, but the treatment is fine. You quickly get used to the mask and how tight it is, the radiographers are ANGELS, there’s free drinks and biscuits and I got to have FIFTEEN minutes lay down EVERYDAY on my own. To a mum is that not heaven? 😂 I used my time on the table each day to meditate my way through all the zapping noises and them in my ear telling me to keep my eyeballs still even though my eyes were closed (which obviously made them move even more). I got so good at meditating that I even fell asleep on a couple of occasions, I was so chilled 😂. I quickly became known as the girl who meditates through her radio and as soon as they saw me they’d ask for my phone, plug it in for me and it just became routine for us all. I’m sure people all get through it in their own individual ways – that was mine and I’m sure stranger things have happened in there!

I enjoyed a 4 week treatment break after radiotherapy and thought – let’s enjoy myself! We went to Center parcs, Disneyland, Belfast and Krakow over the space of that month and just made loads of memories. The fuck it mentality that you get when something like this happens is REAL 😂.  So now I was exhausted, and needed to gear up to start six months of chemotherapy whilst trying to settle back into work at the same time. (In hindsight – not my finest idea, but did I listen to anyone telling me to take more time? NO).

Being back to work was gorgeous at first, I got my purpose back and loved being back with the girls on the ward. I was tired, but when wasn’t I tired?! I was used to that by now! But being a midwife isn’t all the sunshine and rainbows that you think it is, and after a couple of months back, I realised I needed more time off. I couldn’t cope with the stress and pressure of the job any more – my personal life was giving me enough of that! I had no room for anymore. So fast forward to now and I’m off work again, but with the knowledge that I gave it my all trying to go back. Whilst also listening to what my mind and body needed, which was some peace to allow me to continue to recover.

Everytime I reached a milestone in my recovery I thought: it will get better after this bit and I’ll be able to go back to normal. But there was surgery, then my six week recovery from that, then radiotherapy and no matter how much I conquered, I wasn’t getting back to any kind of normal. It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t what I had planned. Everything was still so abnormal from any of aspect of my life before. And I just wanted my life back. So I had my wobbles like I had done in the past, and like I will do again I’m sure. My dad suggested maybe starting up writing these blogs again – maybe that would help me offload a bit. So that’s what I’m trying now. To reduce all the things causing me stress and try to just live a relaxed little content life with a bit of chemo sprinkled in for good measure. And to take all the help I can get which includes not being scared of antidepressants anymore, and being a brave girl about group therapy and support groups.

I start my fourth round of chemo tomorrow and am generally just trying to hold my shit together each day. Sometimes I can do it, and sometimes I absolutely can’t. But I continue to enjoy my strange little life, all the memories we’re making and all the lessons this path is teaching me. We continue to do everything we can to get rid of nasty Nev and despite everything, I will throw my all into that forever more!

Lots of love Jen and Nev

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