“It’s a peculiar, lonely kind of impotence, a cancer diagnosis. If you ran a thousand miles, aced a billion exams, hit a dozen home runs, nothing could reverse or erase the fact of cancer.”
Australian journalist Julia Baird says she was “gripped with terror” after being diagnosed with a rare form of cancer earlier this year.
A health-concious mother with two small children, she says she often wondered how she might feel to have cancer glowing inside her body, “to blithely be stepping through life, unaware that your insides are betraying you,” — but she didn’t expect it to happen to her. At least, not so soon.
In a piece for The New York Times, Baird, who is a host on ABC’s The Drum, describes how it felt to suddenly be staring down the barrel of a life-threatening illness.
“Your world narrows to a slit when facing a diagnosis like that; suddenly very little matters,” she says.
In June, she was hospitalised with a mass in her abdomen that had suddenly ballooned to “the size of a basketball.”
“In the months beforehand I had felt bloated, and my clothes had grown snug, but my friends laughed and gently pointed to the vats of chocolate I consume when facing deadlines,” she says. “I was exhausted but my doctor put it down to my workload.”
Given the suspected diagnosis of advanced ovarian cancer, there was only one treatment option: surgery.
After an agonising two-week wait, Baird underwent an operation to have two large tumours removed from her ovaries and spent a further eight days recovering in intensive care.
She describes the “peculiar, lonely kind of impotence” brought on by cancer diagnosis as she tried to to get on with everyday life in the lead up to her surgery; going about her day-to-day tasks while not knowing if she’d live until the end of the year.
Top Comments
Poor, poor Julia, it's so terribly unfair. I'm so glad that she has found a way of copying and I'll add my prayers to hers.
Thirteen years ago with two young children, I too was given a diagnosis of cancer, not of one but two. I still remember driving home from RNS over the Roseville bridge my vision blurred by tears. Such a sad , lonely feeling - no one and nothing can help, you realise you have to go through it alone. The doctors asked me if I had any questions but all I could think of "was I going to see my children grow up?"
Obviously we are very lucky in Australia, with access ot medical care and most of us have the support of family and friends. But at the end of the day you have to take the journey by yourself one day at a time.
Having lost both my mother and granny as well as a large number of female relatives to ovarian cancer I hope and pray that Julia makes a full recovery and enjoys many happy years with her children.