One Woman Walks Wales

PROLOGUE

It started with a sharp pain, deep down in my side. A period pain, except I wasn't bleeding; I hadn't had periods for a few months. The recent extreme physical exertion I had put my body through meant it had stopped bleeding to conserve energy. It felt like a period pain except it was in the wrong place: too far to the right, almost at the top of my hip bone.

Late at night in a crumbling house in a small still village, remote in the brown plains of north-east Bulgaria, I lay on my sofa-bed rubbing my right hip and deep into my belly. There was a bulge there. A bubble of sensation slid into the centre of me as I pressed my fingers deeper. I didn't think this was a sign of something badly wrong, just strange; I had never noticed before that my body did this. I couldn't lie on my stomach, there was an uncomfortable pressure in there; but still I didn't realise there was anything really wrong

There was something pushing against my intestines, taking all the space. But I didn't know it was there. There was no conscious alarm, no clanging alert-signals or heart-fluttering realisation.

I hitchhiked back to the UK for Christmas. Borrowing a pair of Mum's jeans for a family gathering, I crowed about fitting into a size 12. I was the fittest I'd ever been. I'd just finished a three-month kayak journey, covering 1710 miles through seven European countries. I was bronzed golden-brown with blonde streaks in my curls of river-washed hair, and the technicolour memories had made my eyes blaze bright. As I swung in the motion of constant, economical paddle-movement, the kayaking had changed my body. Hours and hours, day after day I forced the bulbous plastic shell forward against oncoming winds and river conditions. I was full of muscle, my stomach lifted and flattened, my arms and shoulders strong and solid. Even my legs lost fat through daily pushing against the kayak body. I was healthy and beautiful. I was the most confident I had ever been. But there was a pain in my stomach and I didn't recognise it. I couldn't sit comfortably in a chair, there was something inside me that stopped me folding, made a bloated unpleasant pressure in my belly.

The family Christmas became New Year's Eve with friends in Bristol. I mentioned my strangeness to a few people. I feel like I can't bend, I said, blithely. Go to the doctor, they said, so I did, making an appointment as a temporary patient at the surgery around the corner. I was only passing through.

The doctor raised an eyebrow, said it was probably a large ovarian cyst, and sent me for a scan, to confirm it.

I was referred to a consultant who told me that I needed surgery, and scheduled it for twelve weeks' time. Then a blood test showed the cyst might actually be a tumour, that there might be a huge tumour inside me. I was bumped up the list, suddenly a priority. They'd used the word tumour and I had to ask, is that cancer? I'd attended the appointment alone, and a rise of tears grew up within me, my face scrunching in sudden emotion as the implications of that word sank in, becoming the clichéd trauma and all that suggested. There was a heaviness in that word, with all its implied suffering, finality and death. The consultant and nurse bent forward, patting a knee each as if choreographed; they'd been waiting for the ramifications to percolate through me.

I found myself waiting, my fluttering free life unexpectedly stilled by blooming uncertainty, waiting for the next appointment, waiting for another blood test, a scan, a pre-op assessment. I was waiting for a definition that never arrived, the name of the thing inside me, whether or not it was going to kill me. My stomach grew and grew. I couldn't shit, couldn't bend, couldn't tighten my clothes. My ovary was pressing against my diaphragm. There was fluid in my lungs. I couldn't breathe at night. My stomach distended. I felt the growth sloshing as I walked. It loomed silently, motives unreadable, like a jellyfish going about its unfathomable business, sculling slowly through the ocean. I reduced my gait to a gentle shuffle, careful to avoid shaking the bag of matter inside me.

I couldn't forget this was happening. Pain would cut through my belly, the cyst illuminating from within, a thundercloud flashing in sudden booms of white.

"If it bursts before the op, don't go to A&E," said the consultant. "Come straight to ward 78."

"How will I know if it bursts?" I said.

She looked at me sharply, assessing my naivety. "It will hurt."

I lay in bed and pressed my fingers against my swollen stomach. Something was growing inside me, the way a baby should. But it wasn't a child, it was a blank-eyed, brooding, poisonous thing: a growth of malicious and murderous intent, a malignancy. I decided it was an alien baby; I'd been abducted and probed, landing back to earth with a blank memory and a mystery growth that would burst open to reveal a pterodactyl, flapping and cawing before falling to ashes, killed in the bright light of the operating table.

Six weeks after the first doctor's visit, the operation date arrived. February 14th 2012. I joked about the date with the nurse in false, forced brightness, as I sat waiting for the needle that would put me to sleep. When I woke up, there was only pain and heaviness. I didn't know where my body was. I saw the ceiling, beige tiles full of holes, and felt a sense of busyness around me, machines beeping and people moving quickly, intently.

The muscles of my stomach began to ripple, then exploded into bursts of pain.

I was nothing but pain. My breathing stopped. My newly opened body was pulsing against its closure, raw edges stitched together moments previously were being pulled apart by involuntary muscle twitches. The wound screamed and I lay paralysed. I was caged by pain. I was the colour red. I was clay inside a fist.

The nurse found me lying there, immobile, my breathing caught at my throat. She looked into me and held me in her gaze. She was a tall, beautiful woman. I was a flat, heavy line of hurt.

The surgeon bent towards me and told me that as well as completely removing the right ovary, they had also scooped out a growth from my left ovary. In this knowledge came a flash of my future: chemotherapy, spreading cancer, no children. Infertility, hormone imbalance. I was a pair of listening eyes attached to a two-dimensional flat plane. I knew that she was telling me this to check my comprehension, to check that I was present.

My body was assessed for signs of internal bleeding, and the nurse rolled me to one side to administer a powerful painkiller. As she eased me down it came again, the paralysing red roar, but this time she was there, at my face, above me. The pain was dragging me inside myself but she told me to look into her eyes. I held onto her eyes; they were beams of light, a rope to cling to that pulled me out of my pain cage. She told me to breathe, I did and the pain receded. I smiled, and she smiled with me, we were together in that moment.

They took me to the organised murmur of a hospital ward. People muted by illness, curtailed to quietness. Intimacies conducted in full view, unspeakable acts removed behind curtains, privacy maintained through averted eyes.

Morphine dazed me, gave voices a cathedral-like echo, brought them from the other side of my room to speak at my bedside, awareness advancing and retreating at each blink of my eyelids. There were only pillows of sleep and the catching of shallow breaths that first night, my alarms beeping, bringing the nurse over to check I was alive. My body wasn't moving, it felt pressed down, muted, made heavy and quiet by a chemical cosh, lungs barely sipping at air. I was marooned in the night, eyes beaming out from my island bed.

They got me out of bed the day after the operation, body consumed by a fire at the centre, an awkward, hunched step to a chair where I sat for an hour, clicking at the morphine button, feeling my guts burn as they flopped against the raw sutures.

The first walks were to the toilet, struggling, stumbling stiff- legged, bowed at the waist with a hand supporting my stomach. I felt that if I let it hold its weight my belly would drop and burst open, spooling and spattering my insides down, out of the bottom of my gown and onto the mopped and trodden hospital floor. I was surrounded by shuffling patients, our reasons for being there bunched clumsily under the umbrella term "women's problems". At dinnertime an awkwardness of women would make their way down, carefully, gingerly, to the canteen, to be served an awful meal. We were looming, stumbling ghosts in long pale gowns.

A week after the surgery I was out of hospital and waiting for a diagnosis: shuffling around the house, sleeping, doing jigsaws. I had to keep my mind occupied without straining my body. I passed my birthday with my mum, watching films in a miserable hunch on the sofa, trying not to talk or think about how this was the worst birthday ever.

Time held me in a limbo of pre-diagnosis, cancer not confirmed. A week turned to two, my tumour embottled, the spooky floating potato sent to a specialist for another opinion. I was waiting for the hospital to tell me what they took out of me, waiting and suffering while they decided whether this hostile takeover was a...