Rachel Haynes - What Doesnt Kill You: The Highs, Lows and Unexpected Gifts of Surviving Cancer

This edition first published in the UK and USA in 2020 by

Watkins, an imprint of Watkins Media Limited

Unit 11, Shepperton House

8993 Shepperton Road

London

N1 3DF

Design and typography copyright Watkins Media Limited 2020

Text copyright Rachel Haynes 2020

Rachel Haynes has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without prior permission in writing from the Publishers.

1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Typeset by JCS Publishing Services Ltd

Printed and bound in the UK by TJ International Ltd

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-1-786783-55-4

www.watkinspublishing.com

To my family

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to give thanks to anyone who has shown me or my family love. And to anyone who will choose in future to respond with love. It is our only weapon in a tired world.

And to those who I shared this time with whose love burned brightly and whose light continues to shine on every day, my greatest thanks: Naomi Hetherington, Kate Needham, Rachel Vince, Tony Levy, Chris Hagues, Alison Selfe, Hazel Elkamouri, Hannah Berry, Jackie Haslam, Mary Youallaris, Laura Paperdollybird, Sian Briggs, Ruth Dunn, Julie Swallow, Anne Carling, John Mundy, Charlotte Kitley, Gail Allen, Mark McLauchlan, Katie Scarborough, Amy Mattingly, Steve Shergold, David Twist.

CONTENTS

PREFACE

STILL ALIVE

I have thought a lot about why I am sharing my story and I can tell you its not for personal glory, or for being told I am inspirational, or for money. Lets face it, publishing aint what it used to be! And all my proceeds are going to Bowel Cancer UK anyway.

Im sharing this because I know stories are powerful, give hope and might possibly help anyone reading this feel a little less alone. And hope and a search for a purpose to make this final wake-up call stick is why I wrote this book. While I can never claim my survival is down to anything I did or didnt do, I know from my own experience that picturing someone who has actually come out the other side makes all the difference to the 3 am voices in your head. There is so much said and misunderstood about survival and cancer that being honest about the complex feelings that lie beneath the surface helps us all find a new language to discuss the pain we might, quite naturally, still be carrying.

The last thing my friend Kate said to me as we walked in opposite directions after what was to be our last lunch together before she died was that I had to live to tell the full tale. My original book published in 2013, The C List: How I Survived Bowel Cancer (written under my then name Rachel Bown), focused on documenting, in as humorous a way as I could, my experiences. I have condensed some of the material into Part One my physical survival.

But what happened next was unexpected and life-changing, and has become the inspiration for writing this follow-up book the nature of psychological survival and what it did to me.

Six months before Kate died, I was living what I thought was my best life. I was tentatively starting out on the road to recovery. I had just kicked the bad man out and met a good man. I was in a high-powered job with responsibility. I was the mother of two teenagers and had a dog. I was a published author. And I had a new protective badge, that of advanced cancer survivor. Too smug maybe

But my original book had ended on a cliff-hanger. A postscript slipped in at the back just before the book was published: The cancer came back. And so much that followed was left unsaid and unprocessed.

So many people have died of their cancer since that book was published, many more are facing the prospect. The responsibility of telling the honest truth of what lies beneath survival in all its vulnerability and being respectful of those who have died, while avoiding any hint of ingratitude, is a hard one to pull off.

But the urge to make sense of everything wouldnt go away. It took me some time and courage to find my voice though.

Cancer has done its best to train my eye and my writing. Im now using it to train my mind.

It might feel like I have a mortality complex, obsessed with the passing of time, and you probably fear youve just opened a book so gloomy you suddenly want to regress to childhood, grab that soft teddy and sing a nursery rhyme. But actually, far from being gloomy, these thoughts have become the thorn in my side that pushed me into recognizing the gifts I have been given.

I see dead people, I remember Cole Sear in The Sixth Sense (1999) claiming. I wouldnt go that far, although I am learning to see the difference living among the dying has made to the way I live.

Like most people I thought I had the luxury of time and options and where possible I would put off till tomorrow what I should have done today.

But all that changed when the overwhelming urge to live for my children was planted in me the second I heard the words: We are not sure if there is anything we can do. It would take all of my energy and many years to get close to finding out how to turn that urge to live into a way to live.

One mentor I met along the way was Dan Buettner, a renowned National Geographic fellow, scientist and founder of Blue Zones, who identified five regions in the world where people live the longest happiest lives. I bumped into him at a wellness festival in Kaplankaya, Turkey, last year where I was researching speakers for a client event. Unaware of my unreliable cell history, he ambled over to me and asked me if I wanted to know how long I was predicted to live.

Naturally, I was taken aback. He asked me to put my hand up every time I could answer yes to any one of the following nine questions:

1. Do you sleep over 7.5 hours a night?
2. Do you walk more than a mile and a half every day?
3. Do you belong to a faith-based religion? And do you turn up more than four times a month?
4. Have you never had unprotected sex with a stranger in your lifetime?
5. Do you have the vocabulary to be able to articulate your sense of purpose?
6. Do you have three good friends you can count on when having a bad day? (And the criteria for calling them good friends is being able to have a meaningful conversation, calling them up when you have a problem and they actually care, and finally, that you like them!)
7. Have you never smoked or given up over five years ago?
8. Do you eat mainly a plant-based diet?
9. Do you have the health or desire to want to live over 90?

If you answered yes to all of these, congratulations youre on your way to living to 100! And no, Im not going to let you in on how many I answered yes to yet. Youll have to read on.

PART ONE

PHYSICAL SURVIVAL

CHAPTER 1

RACING FOR LIFE

Thirty-two minutes was all it took. Well, that, a nagging inner voice and maybe a year or so in delay tactics. I finished Cancer Research UKs five-kilometre Race for Life in June 2011 on the Rye in High Wycombe in 32 minutes. Yes, I promised my mother and daughter, who were also running, that I would walk it as the doubling-up pain from somewhere unknown inside me was getting worse. But as I was dragging my body around the sea of pink shirts again for the third year running in memory of my auntie Naomi, who had died of bowel cancer at the age of 50 a few years previously, the emotion and adrenaline of the event overtook me, and I decided it would be gutless to walk (just notice how many synonyms for cowardice relate to the body: lily-livered, yellow-bellied, spineless, chicken-hearted, weak-kneed, having the willies). It was also true that I would rather admit to a double homicide than concede to being outrun by my poor mother! So I ran sandwiched in between my 11-year-old daughter and my 65-year-old mother. I knew, as I finished, that something was wrong. You might sensibly wonder why it did not occur to me before in a field hosed down with memories and experiences of cancer that I would also be carrying this disease. But all I can say is that humanity is divided by two great beliefs: it will never happen to me, and everything always happens to me.