The DM That Changed My Life: The Day I Found Out My Mum Had Cancer

At the beginning of my second year of university, I decided to actually start going to lectures. I was running late, taking the steps from the lobby to the media block two at a time in a too-short skirt. As I stopped at the top to pull my skirt back down past my arse cheeks, I saw two missed calls from my eldest sister. “What’s up?” I texted back.

Almost immediately, she replied. “It’s about Mum. We’re at the hospital.”

There was a large cancerous mass in my mother’s left breast; Stage 4, demanding immediate attention.

Growing up, I always battled with a stream of anxious thoughts. If I didn’t turn around in the shower enough times, wet hands would grab me from behind and drag my body down the drain. Or my Barbies would come alive when I left the room, asymmetrical haircuts standing on end, plotting revenge because I practiced ‘hairdressing’ on them.

But the one that made me lose hours of sleep was the thought that my parents might die in the night. I would walk past their bedroom in the early hours of the morning to check for snoring or sounds of movement, pretending that I was crossing the landing to the toilet. It didn’t help. The only assurance I got of my parents’ health was Mum coming into my room before school each morning, switching on the lights and bellowing, “Wakey-wakey, rise and shine!” If she had the energy to be so exuberantly annoying at six in the morning, death was far off.

Plus, the fear came out of nowhere. I am one of the lucky people to have never experienced the death of someone close to me. The nearest loss I can think of is when my goldfish, Sean Paul – my first and only pet – died when I was 11.

As I stood at the top of the stairs, all of my death-related anxieties returned. I didn’t return my sister’s call. Instead I ran back down the stairs, skipping the first of many lectures that year, and raced across London to the hospital to find out that my mum had breast cancer.

Two weeks before, I had forced her to miss work and go to a routine screening for women over 50. She is the type of person to do everything she can to avoid taking a day off work (a trait she did not pass down to me). Since taking maternity leave 24 years ago, she has only missed work for funerals, or if one of her children were ill – never herself. But when the results from the scan came back, showing a glowing ball of white amongst healthy breast tissue, she would be signed off work for almost a year for surgery, chemotherapy and radiotherapy. Everything would be completely different.

My mum had me at 40, meaning she was the oldest out of my friends’ parents who all celebrated their 40th birthdays while we were in secondary school, but she always kept up with the other mums. Well into her fifties, she began looking after her older siblings when they became unwell, while also taking care of her grandson. Now, due to the chemotherapy, her face has greyed and most days, she isn’t strong enough to lift up her grandson.

My fear of death still looms. My mum, who is about to begin chemotherapy again, recently asked me to help pick out her new kitchen. She reasoned that her house will belong to me and my siblings soon, anyway.

It’s weird to grapple with the idea that one day, your parents won’t be there. It’s made weirder still for me because I find out about most of my mum’s health updates from our family WhatsApp group. Due to kids, work or living in another timezone, my relatives have very different schedules, so this is apparently the solution: for us to find out in a group message when Mum has lost the feeling in her fingertips because of nerve damage from chemo, or that another surgery has been scheduled. We all find out at once, wherever we are and whatever we’re doing. Every time I get a notification on my phone, I wonder if it will be more bad news like the time I stood on the stairs to the media block and everything changed.

Or it could just be Mum asking for someone’s Netflix password again.

@nanasbaah