My husband was wonderful, very, very supportive and friends were superb. I had a lot of back-up from friends, both coming to see me and sending me cards and flowers, it was wonderful.

Yes a great deal of support. I mean, you do tend to get tearful once in a while and I always knew that I could ring somebody up and you do get depressed. Whether that’s the drugs I don’t know, but there were times when I was quite depressed and I only had to ring somebody up and I could talk, I could ramble, and they’d just let me ramble, and that was great. I didn’t do it to [husband] because he needed me to be positive. So I used to take it out on friends.

It was like when I came out of the hospital after surgery, they took over. My house was filled with people and they, I had no choice really, I couldn’t do anything much. You know, I could just about get myself showered and dressed and that took ages.

And I had a friend who came down, one of my oldest girlfriends from, who lives in Cumbria, she came down for a week, the first week, after the first weekend, for that first week and she just took over, basically said to my daughter and my sister ‘look, I’m here for a week, you know, you’ll be needed when I’m gone, I can only give you a week, but let me do everything, and she did.

And since then my other sister, the one who flew back from Rome, shes just been my most incredible solid support. Shes just unflinchingly, whatever I’ve needed, and shes done it, she hasn’t said ‘Can I?, Do you want me to?’ Or ‘what should I?’ Shes just done it. I mean more lately as I’ve become more well and everything, it’s, you know, ‘Shall we?’ or you know, shell find it hard to know what to do with herself I should think after all this, but anyway.

Tell me how your husband was supportive?

Kind, very kind. If I wanted to do anything, there was a period when I couldn’t drive, he would take me anywhere I wanted to go. He actually was working full-time so he would take time off work if I needed to go anywhere or I wanted to go anywhere. Wouldn’t let me do much housework. He tried to find me a cleaner, unsuccessfully, so he took on the role of doing the housework, under duress. And he used to do all the cooking, in fact he still does a lot of cooking now, but he took on the role of doing most of the cooking. And yes, I couldn’t have got through the chemo without him. Held my head, held my hand when I was being sick, brought me bowls, sat on the loo with me, well not sat on the loo with me but held my hand in the loo with me. Oh that was something else, it wasn’t just being sick, it was both ends and it was unpleasant. And yes, mopping up after me, and that meant quite a lot, because a lot of men would have shied away from that. But yes, I found that very comforting.

I did have a lot of support from lots of friends, and one of the ways that I found of coping was by talking. And if you tried to get through to us on the phone when I first came back from hospital and while I was having chemotherapy there was a problem, because if people phoned up I would just talk and talk and talk, and that was part of the way I found of coping with it.

And we had all sorts of people helping us, people offered to take me up for chemotherapy. People offered to cook meals, and I know I kept the florist in business locally because there were loads of bouquets of flowers kept arriving, that was really nice to feel that people were really supportive. And people from church were praying for me and there was a huge support network around me.

But I think when you get to the end of treatment people would say to me Oh so that’s the end of it,’ and they will assume that that was the end of the chapter and I was going to be OK and they would forget that there were endless check-ups and the endless concern that if you have a pain for more than a day you think that the cancer is coming back.

What sort of support have you had from your family and friends and colleagues?

Well very good really. Not many people really talked to me outside the, well in fact family don’t even actually talk to me about it. My sister commented the other day ‘I feel very guilty about, when I think about you and your chemo because we just left you to get on with it. And I said ‘Well, you wouldn’t want it, you wouldn’t have wanted to be involved anyway because I wasn’t a pretty sight, I wasn’t nice to know and I didn’t really want anybody around me anyway. So really I’m glad you did that really. Sometimes it would have been nice perhaps to talk about it and say how I felt and but, you know, we did choose not to make too much of it with them because we just didn’t want them to worry too much.

But, yeah, people were very supportive but they didn’t talk to you very much about it. And when you’re back at work, once your bum’s sitting on the chair, you know, you’re fit. Great, you’re back at work. You wouldn’t be back at work if you weren’t fit, would you?

But I thank God even up to now because after that the doctors were kind to me, they were good to me, they tried to explain to me, I still up to now don’t understand, because what I do have is the faith that I believe, and that faith that’s what helps me more that anything else.

But now it doesn’t matter, I know when God is with me and the God is with doctors, everythings possible. I’m not losing hope. I’ll continue hanging on in my faith.

But through the faith things are much much better. And I’m telling you and I’ll tell you again, and I’m not ashamed to say it again, I know hes able, God is able, and everything is possible with God, and I got my feelings, yeah I believe it, step by step, I believe it, because my dear, my stomach was rotten, I saw it. Even to sit here like this, it’s the grace of the Lord.