Donaghadee mum Donna was diagnosed with ovarian cancer just before lockdown and had her surgery delayed by seven weeks. She found the Cancer Focus Northern Ireland counselling service invaluable during that time.
“Having cancer during COVID brought a whole extra layer of stresses including having my surgery delayed.
“I was asked to come in for surgery the week after my diagnosis. In my head I thought ‘I can deal with this. It’s stage 2 so has been caught early, and that’s good. It’s in a place where it can hopefully be cut out.’
“When the time came, lockdown had happened. The hospital apologised but all elective surgery had been stopped and it could be a three or even six month delay.
“Panic set in, even private clinics were only doing emergency surgeries. I just had to wait. The psychological impact was pretty horrendous. You don’t know what is going on inside your body. I was thinking ‘this is spreading and growing. Will it have spread too much?’ It was very frightening.
“In the end my surgery was delayed by seven weeks and I had a radical hysterectomy – thankfully the cancer hadn’t spread.
“My diagnosis was on my mind all day every day. You just think in your head ‘am I going to die?’. You try not to let your family know how worried you actually are. You are trying to deal with the unknown and it certainly isn’t easy.
“The psychological impact was pretty horrendous. You don’t know what is going on inside your body. I was thinking ‘this is spreading and growing. Will it have spread too much?’ It was very frightening.
“In the end my surgery was delayed by seven weeks and I had a radical hysterectomy – thankfully the cancer hadn’t spread.
“My diagnosis was on my mind all day every day. You just think in your head ‘am I going to die?’. You try not to let your family know how worried you actually are. You are trying to deal with the unknown and it certainly isn’t easy.
“My counsellor at Cancer Focus NI was fantastic. When you’re going through all that you are so focused on healing physically that the psychological stress is still slightly to the side. It was after my major surgery, when I was feeling better physically, that all these other emotions started to come to the fore.
“It was invaluable to be able to talk through everything. We have a very close family but they were worried enough about me. I didn’t want to put my stress and anxiety on them too, so this was the perfect safety valve. I could release all that tension and worry without causing upset at home. My counsellor helped me such a lot to find a way through it and out the other side. She was wonderful.”
Your Christmas gift of £20 today, or whatever you can afford, to support a 1-hour counselling session, could help your neighbours, friends or family should they ever find themselves in Donna’s position.
With your support today, another local person could receive the care of one of our counsellors this Christmas and into 2021.
