I think the initial diagnosis kind of hit us both a little bit. I mean we’d been married just a year to the day almost, when I was diagnosed, so that was very hard. Obviously it kind of changed the, what can I say, it changed the dynamics of the relationship in quite a major way, because you don’t really expect something like this to happen to you when you’re newly married and, you know, you’ve got your life ahead of you.

Then it’s been a learning curve since then, you know, things have not helped, things have not worked out for us in the normal sense of the terms and, you know, as in getting married and, you know, discovering new places, new things, interests. All of those things have kind of just come by the by. it’s always been my illness and my treatments and, you know, rushing round from one place to the other, the hospitals and so on, and concentrating on getting better. That’s how it’s been for us. So it’s been slightly different sort of dynamics. But it’s been a long, it’s been long sort of twelve long years, so hopefully, you know, it’s not been that bad.

How do you think your husband’s coped with your illness?

He’s taken it in his stride. He’s been very supportive. Obviously it can’t have been completely, you know, completely without disappointments for him. As I said, the circumstances in which I was diagnosed were quite unfortunate. I’d only been married for a year and, you know, we were still kind of discovering married life and all of that. And all of that was suddenly abandoned and everybody’s attentions were now focused on me getting better. So it couldn’t have been easy for somebody who was, you know, suddenly found themselves from a position of being a husband to one of being a carer that, you know, yes people do that but maybe not, you know, a year into their marriage. So I think, yeah, but he’s not a very expressive person anyway. He’s quite a sort of, he keeps things to himself a lot. But it’s been quite hard on him I think. I think he does have some bitterness, but on the whole he’s been very, very supportive and he’s looked after me very well and encouraged me in, you know, in sort of professional pursuits and so on.

And what about your husband? Do you think that having had cancer affected your relationship with him?

It did. He was a bit shattered and at times didn’t really know how to deal with it. He wouldn’t go to any men’s groups or counselling or that sort of thing. He just didn’t, he would insist that he didn’t need it, but I think it did, you know, he was anxious. And when I was going through the struggle with the depression and he couldn’t deal with it at all, he didn’t know what was wrong. It was only when my daughter came home and said, that he sort of began to understand. He thought that my attitude to him had changed, and I wasn’t aware of if it had. I mean there were times when I just wanted to run away from him. I didn’t, you know, I didn’t want to speak to him. I didn’t want him around me. Looking back on it, you know, afterwards I thought, Well, why didn’t I ring, you know, why didn’t I do something about it then But I just thought that, I think it may have been that I thought that he wasn’t reacting to me, that he wasn’t understanding me the way I thought he should, and it wasn’t that at all.

It was just this awful, so afterwards I would say it took a while for us to work back to our former relationship, I’m sure of it. You know, now that I think about it, it did take a while and a lot of reassuring on my, of me reassuring him that it had, you know, that it wasn’t anything, that it wasn’t really me. Some husbands deal with, just looking, you know, from my experience some husbands deal with it very well and then others, obviously, it happens in life doesn’t it, others can’t cope with it at all. But my husband was very supportive in our decisions that had to be made, you know.

And how’s your husband coped generally?

Very well, but it’s left him with a great need to control every situation, because for so long I suppose, in the beginning and then twice more when I was really touch and go, your carers have to do everything, don’t they? You know, think of every meal, think of things that will tempt you to eat, change the beds, do the washing, sort out somebody to do the cleaning, make sure there’s food in the larder, remember everybody’s birthday.

They have to do everything and care for you as well, and then when you get better that’s really hard isn’t it? Because the patient gets better and says, I can do this, I can drive myself to Tesco, I can sho. Oh no, no I don’t think you should do tha, and so it, it’s left him in, not knowing really how to cope when the situation changes. And so you maybe have frictions where I have to understand that if he feels I shouldn’t do things or can’t do things, it’s not because he’s controlling my life, it’s because he’s used to having to think these thoughts and to do it.

So I think that has made him more tense. But he’s not a verbaliser and he’s not a moaner, and we both tried from the beginning to make sure that the bits of his life that are his, like going to rowing at regattas, and being in the domino team, and going to play poker in the poker school whenever it’s on, and going to the bridge club, that he never stopped doing that.

And all my friends were great in that they would say, you know, to my husband, If you want to go to bridge I’ll come and sit withrdquo;, me, and that was important to me as well, and often he would only just go up to the pub but he would leave the number by the bed. I only once ever had to ring to ask him to come back but it was important for both of us that normal life carries on. So I think he’s been very good at that and that’s really the only relatively small thing, although it seems like a big thing when you’re bickering about who can drive the car or whatever, you know.

Through the second period of cancer my personality changed, I think that’s quite an interesting one. I turned from a sort of happy outgoing kind of person to a sort of introspective, unhappy, certainly very angry – and this is only in retrospect now, I mean at the time I didn’t know it but, you know – I was really angry at this intrusion into, you know, my life, I think. And, you know, this had a detrimental effect on my marriage and all the people around me. And I found, you know, I was impossible to talk to, I wouldn’t listen to, you know, people saying that, you know, Oh you’re changin, or, You’re not the person you used to b, or, You need to go and seek some help about your ange, or, This is affecting, you know, your relationships with your wife or children or your friend, or, you know, I don’t like the kind of person you’re turning int. And certainly it was, you know, I wasn’t available to listen to this kind of stuff, even from professionals.

And people around me who, me having cancer affected them as much as it affected me, well of course at the time, you know, I never really, I couldn’t see it, you can only see the problem you’re going through. And this definitely affected all the people who were around me and who wanted me to get better and who cared for me. And I could’ve handled that much better if there’d been somewhere, someone there who I’d have been able to talk to. I couldn’t really talk to my consultant because, you know, he was dealing with, you know, another twenty people at the time and I considered myself to be a strong enough person. You know, I think of myself as a coper, you know, I can cope with anything but, you know, looking back obviously I coped quite badly with what I went through.

And through, once the second set of treatments had finished, the anger that I felt through that process, that carried on for a number of years and I think, you know, my personality changed and it was definitely a detrimental effect on my relationship with my wife and my son, you know. I’m not particularly pleased about the way I was during that my period, especially as my son was so young.

Were you ever offered any kind of counselling or anything to deal with your feelings?

Yes I was offered, well I was told where counselling was available. My wife independently went off to see the consultant and a cancer charity to talk about the problems that we were having through the process and after the process. I mean the fact that once the treatment finished and I was okay and then it never came back again for years afterwards, I mean I was never the same person, and I think I only got back to being the person I was before personality-wise maybe five or six or seven years after the event, by which time it was too late for, things had been said and done which couldn’t be unsaid and undone.

And if I’d been offered counseling, or if I’d gone for it, I think I was a little bit too proud to go for counselling as well, which was a mistake obviously. But if it had been more readily available or more strongly advised to me and I’d gone for it then maybe some of the things that were said and done wouldn’t have been said and done and maybe things would have turned out better after the event.

So it ended in the break-up of your marriage in the end, didn’t it?

Yes it ended up in the break-up of my marriage, and I have to say that my, I mean my ex-wife through the whole process, you know, she was fantastic, it wasn’t her fault. But cancer affects everybody, it just do

At the time the girl that I was with that I’ve been with long-term, she provided no support whatsoever, she was worse than rubbish, and in fact she made it quite clear to me that she didn’t want to be with me.

Oh dear.

So that caused the end of our relationship. But again it was somebody that I couldn’t talk to, so much so that – I can laugh at it now but I mean it hurt badly at the time – so much so that I phoned her up and told her that I might be left with long-term kidney damage. And it was a couple of weeks before Christmas, and said that they’d changed my drug regimen because it was starting to damage my kidneys. And she said, "Look I’m not interested, I’m getting ready for a Christmas do". And I went, "Oh thanks very much". And that was a really tough one as well.

How did your husband cope with all of this?

In hindsight he didn’t. At the time when it was all happening I think he was as dumbstruck as I was. But I think long-term I don’t think he coped with it.

And at what stage did your relationship break down?

Funnily enough as everything was getting all right. As everything started to be okay, and I still get very, very tired now, I’m sort of, I’m seven years post-transplant but, and when I tell them at the hospital it’s, What do you expect?’, and that’s all I get. But saying that, I do my best to keep as fit as I possibly can. But it did, it broke down, it literally broke down as things were getting better.

Why do you think that is?

I don’t know. I honestly cannot say, apart from, if you like, how the marriage broke up and what the final straw was. But I just felt that he’d, he didn’t, I don’t think he ever, I think he thought that, when I used to come out of the hospital after my treatment I was fine, and I think he expected that when I came out of hospital following my transplant that I would be in the same picture of health, if you like, and I wasn’t. And it took a good two years for me to be anything like normal, if you like. Also, losing the hair didn’t do me a lot of good, losing a vast amount of weight didn’t do me a lot of good, plus putting the weight back on. That’s the part of it that I found hard to deal with, if you like, but what did it matter? There’s always a wig. Do you know what I mean?

I mean I don’t make any bones about the fact that it was my husband that broke up the relationship, but it was at the point where everything was getting better that it broke up.

And what about the infertility issue? Was that a part of the problem with your marriage?

I would say that it was and it wasn’t. It was a case, I think you’ve got to, I tried to rationalise it, how can I put it? I did try and rationalise that, you know, the possibility was I might not have been here, so what is the point of having a child if it can’t have a mother? And that was the way that I’ve I had to think, and just do it that way, and I suppose in any marriage a child is a blessing anyway and it’s an add-on, if you like. You know, it’s something that you don’t necessarily expect, but when you are getting married you do expect that you’re going to have a child if you want children. But, you know, there was other things open to us at the time, like adoption, whatever, but we just never got round to doing things like that, and possibly on my own I don’t know whether I could cope with a child, to be honest, sonbsp;