All day yesterday I tried to sit down and write a blog as it was a significant day for me.  But, as with many others at this time of year, I was preoccupied with my full-time, unpaid Mum’s taxi service role for my gorgeous (even though they grunt at me) teenage boys.

But, oh how grateful I am to be running my grunting teenagers around, feeling probably more emotionally and physically well than I’ve ever been.

This time 4 years ago was a very different story.

I can remember 20th August 2020 in vivid detail.  In the morning my eldest son received his GCSE results; which was, of course, the year that they didn’t actually get to take their exams due to Covid.  The additional uncertainty that ensued as a result of that was soon dispelled when he received fabulous results and, of course, made me burst with pride.

To be followed by a phone call from my doctor in the afternoon while I was driving home from the park with my youngest son.  The nervousness in her voice as she said she would call me back when I was at home as she didn’t want to speak while I was driving even though I was on hands-free.

I vividly remember that 10 minute wait at home for the phone to ring to be told that the blood tests they’d been doing to investigate some nose bleeds I’d been having (which I now believe to be unrelated to the diagnosis) indicated that I had cancer.

She asked me to come down to the surgery so she could talk to me in person and I called my friend to come and be with my children.  I remember shaking and crying as my friend hugged me as I conveyed the news to her and I vividly remember the sheer terror and confusion of sitting opposite my doctor as she repeated what she’d told me on the phone to my face at the surgery.

How on earth was this possible?  I was starting to re-build my life after my marriage breakdown a couple of years before.  I loved my work as a Life Coach and I had three beautiful sons.  I had everything to live for.

Everything was spinning around me.  I had no idea what was up and what was down.  What was true and what was imagined.  What on earth was going on?

My precious friends persuaded me to go the pub that evening as we all celebrated the success of our amazing children in their GCSE’s.  I can see the memory so clearly even now as I sat on the picnic bench outside the pub playing with a bottle of beer.  Observing the situation and myself like it was some sort of bizarre film.

I went into a numb, dissociated state of survival over the next two weeks; I took my boys away for a surreal trip to Southampton, mid-Covid, where we stayed in a 4-star hotel but because neither the restaurant or spa were open could quite honestly have been a basic budget hotel.

I put a smile on my face and tried to stay present and savour each moment with my precious boys.  I didn’t even lose my shit when it started hailing (in August) while were cycling through the New Forest and my youngest was moaning every step of the way.  I was alive, I had 3 beautiful boys, whether they were moaning or not.

I was called into hospital to have a bone marrow biopsy a week after our holiday.  If you’ve never had one I wouldn’t recommend it to be honest.  But they did give me a very large canister of gas and air to distract me from the large needle they were pushing into my pelvis, and I’d forgotten how much fun they could be, with it being a fair few years since I’d been in childbirth!

The doctor doing the biopsy was lovely and talked me through every step of what he was doing and laughed his head off when I asked him to put some dance music on as I felt like I was in Ministry of Sound – off my tits, I think was the expression I used.

I had my first meeting with my allocated Consultant a week later…an apparently emotionless corduroy-clad man will a monotone voice.  Don’t get me wrong, my empathy for the horrible things he probably has to tell people was sitting right under the surface of the hatred and disgust I felt towards him as he told me, that the bone marrow biopsy had confirmed that I did indeed have cancer.  Oh, and not only that, it wasn’t curable.

He rattled out some generic statistics about the average life expectancy being approximately 8-10 years but this could be prolonged a bit with 6-months of chemotherapy followed by a stem cell transplant where I would be in hospital for a month, away from the emotional safety and healing environment of my family, my cats and my friends, and I would lose my hair.  Yay, lucky me.

I remember looking behind me when he told me the average life expectancy was 8-10 years, to see who he was talking to.  An instinctive reaction which I now believe was my intuition saying, who on earth is he talking to because this is not my story.

The following few weeks were a complete blur where I lurched from panic and confusion to a dissociated, detached version of myself, apparently getting on with life but not actually in my body or allowing myself to feel into the enormity of what I’d been told.

Sporadically, however, I was able to tap into a grounded sense of determination and strength that this was NOT how my story was going to end.  It might be a chapter but it wasn’t the whole story.

And 4 years on, my life is completely different but not because I allowed the fear of a diagnosis to control me or convince me I needed to fill my body with drugs and kill off its immunity, but because I didn’t buy into that approach.  Because I believe that the body wants to heal itself if we create the conditions for it to do that.

Four years of research, particularly involving the work of Dr Gabor Mate, Dr Bruce Lipton and Dr Joe Dispenza and a truck-load of holistic healing modalities, has lead me to believe that dis-ease is created by unprocessed trauma and stuck emotion that hasn’t been released.  This prevents our body being in equilibrium; a state where it can regulate and heal itself.

So four years on I’m still plodding through writing my story of my healing journey…possibly the slowest book writing on record but I am determined to finish it!  The story is my healing journey of reconnecting with the wisdom of my body and my truth and how I learned to let go of mentally constructed beliefs and perceptions about myself and release stuck emotion, to support my body to be in equilibrium so it can heal itself.

Click here if you’d like to keep up-to-date with the progress of the book (it’s sporadic)!

And as I’ve mentioned many times before, this is just my story based on my own beliefs and my personal experiences and what has worked for me.  Everyone has their own beliefs and must do what feels right for them but my heart and soul know that I need to share my story so if it resonates drop me a line.

With love as always.

Sarah xx