The beginning of the end

The floor

Four years ago, on a Saturday night, I had COVID and a fever of forty two.

And I drank a bottle of rosé anyway, and I smoked three cigarettes anyway, which tells you everything about where I was that I could write for a week and not say better.

I ended up on the floor of my entrance hall. Next to the mirror. Next to the bathroom door. Just lying there, because I could not get further than that.

The emergency number was already dialled on my phone. I had not pressed it. I was holding it, deciding, because I genuinely thought I was dying and some part of me was not sure I wanted to stop it.

And lying there, before everything went out, I said something to God.

If I wake up tomorrow, I will change my life. I will never drink and I will never smoke again.

I had tried to stop many times before. Many. This time was different and I know exactly why.

And if there is one thing you should know about me, it is this. I keep my promises. I am old fashioned about it in a way that is almost a fault. When I give my word, that is the end of the discussion, including when the person I gave it to is God and nobody on earth would ever find out.

I woke up. It was the sixteenth.

I want to be precise about what that sentence contains, because it is easy to read as a tidy little victory and it was not tidy at all.

It contains the night my sister died, in October 2023, which I watched happen on a phone screen from another country. It contains being betrayed by people I had let all the way in. It contains the morning I understood that my left hand, my dominant hand, was not coming back. It contains being told, more than once, by people with qualifications, that this was going to kill me and that it would not take long.

Not one of those was big enough to take the promise back.

“I have not had a drink or a cigarette since. Not one. Not in four years.”

There was an earlier one

This was not the first promise I ever made to God.

When I got that job, I promised God I would never drink during the week. He had got me the job. That was the deal and I kept it. Monday to Thursday, nothing, not once.

Friday to Sunday I drank.

The year the thing inside me changed its mind

And all of that year the cancer was growing, and I did not know it.

I want to be accurate here, because this is the part people misunderstand about metastatic disease. I was not undiagnosed. I had known for years. Three small places in my body, six millimetres each, stable, held exactly where they were by medication. That is what living with metastatic cancer looks like for a great many people. It is there, it is watched, and you get on with your life.

What I did not know was that during that year it had stopped being small.

I was working, functioning, delivering, trying to be the best version of myself I could manage from Monday to Thursday, with a disease in me that had quietly changed its mind.

Nobody told me the bottle was part of it

I want to put something here that I did not know then and that I know now, because if you take one practical thing away from this whole series, let it be this one.

Alcohol is a proven carcinogen. Not suspected. Not probably. The World Health Organization's cancer agency put it in the same category as tobacco and asbestos, Group 1, which is the category for things where the evidence that they cause cancer in humans is no longer in question. That classification is from 1988. It is older than a lot of the doctors I have sat in front of.

And breast cancer is specifically on the list. It is not a general warning about cancer somewhere in the body. Alcohol is causally linked to cancer of the breast, and most of the breast cancers caused by alcohol in Europe are caused by what people would describe as light or moderate drinking. In 2023 the WHO said plainly that there is no safe amount. In January 2025 the United States Surgeon General asked for cancer warning labels on bottles and named breast cancer in the first paragraph.

I drank every weekend for years with metastatic breast cancer in my body, and not one person ever said that sentence to me.

I want to be careful and exact here, because the moment I overstate something is the moment somebody gets to dismiss everything else I have written.

So: the alcohol part is settled science and I will argue it with anybody. Smoking is a proven cause of many cancers, and for breast cancer specifically the research is strong but the official bodies still call it suggestive rather than proven. I am not going to pretend otherwise. I will only say that nobody is smoking broccoli sprouts. You are inhaling industrial chemistry, several times a day, for years, and the idea that it stops politely at the lungs has never made sense to me.

And I will tell you what I personally believe, marked clearly as belief and not as evidence, because you deserve to know the difference: I think sugar was part of mine too. That one is not proven and I am not going to dress it up as if it were.

Here is the whole reason this section exists. I was not given this information. I had to go and find it, years late, by reading the research myself, after I had already stopped. You should not have to do that. Now you have it.

“If a doctor ever tells me again that alcohol has nothing to do with breast cancer, I will pick up my things and walk out of that room. It has happened to me once. It will not happen twice.”

I was not always this person

I did not start with a problem. I started as a social drinker in a culture where that is not only normal, it is polite. A glass at dinner. A glass with colleagues. A glass because something good happened, and then a glass because something good happens so rarely.

Then I was a regular drinker. Then I was a drinker who waited until two in the afternoon, because if you start at two you are not an alcoholic, you are just someone having a drink in the afternoon. That was the sentence I used on myself for years.

I was an alcoholic. I was not born one. I became one, slowly, in full view of nobody, because I live alone.

The same with cigarettes. Social smoker, then regular smoker, then a smoker who only smokes in the kitchen, and sometimes in the office, which is another one of those sentences.

The bottles in the corners

Here is the detail I find hardest to write down.

I was hiding bottles in my own house. In corners. Behind things. And there was nobody to hide them from. I live alone. I do not have people coming in and out.

I was hiding them from myself, so that when I walked through my own living room I would not have to count them.

“You can be the only person in a house and still be lying to somebody in it.”

Croatia, two weeks before

The last week of September, I went to Croatia. That is two or three weeks before the floor, not a lifetime. It is the closest thing I have to a before photograph.

I had invited a colleague to stay with me, for free, in the place I had rented. On one of those nights she drank until she could not walk, and I found her at a table with people who did not look safe. I do not want to dress that up. They looked like trouble and she was in no condition to notice.

So I took her home and I looked after her all night. I did it the way I had always wished somebody would do it for me. That is the only reason I knew how. Everything I know about being taken care of, I learned by not being taken care of and working out what was missing.

I want to be fair to myself here, because this is not a story about being as bad as she was. I was never drunk like that. Not once. What happened to me that night was not recognition of a behaviour. It was disgust at a whole way of living, seen suddenly from the outside, in somebody else's body.

And I had followed her. That is the part. I drank with her all night, when what I actually wanted was to go to bed early and wake up fresh and have one clear day by the sea before I flew home.

Instead I spent that last day destroyed. I had to force food down. I drank electrolytes all day. I had to take something to stop the attack that comes when you have not slept and your body has had enough. I came very close to walking into the medical centre at the airport, not because anything dramatic had happened, but because I had taken a perfectly good body and wrecked it for no reason at all.

There was another moment on that trip, smaller, that I still think about. I opened my suitcase in that beautiful apartment and I could smell cigarettes in my clothes. Properly smell it. I had never smelled it at home, because at home I was the smell.

And for the two weeks between Croatia and the floor, something in me was out of order. Torn apart is the only way I can say it. Every part of me was screaming and none of it could get out.

Until the fever.

“I did not want that life any more. That was the whole thought. Not I should stop. I do not want this.”

The years that made the hole

2019 was hard.

2020 was going to be my year, and then the world closed. I lost my clients. I lost the work I had built over fifteen years of being self employed. Everything I had made with my own hands went quiet at the same time.

2021 I started climbing back.

2022 I took a job in a company, because I thought maybe that is what you do, maybe you stop carrying everything alone and you join a group of people.

On one of my first days, a colleague told me this, as a kindness, as a warning:

He was right. There was a man there who talked to everyone like a teacher addressing a slow class, who treated people like something he had stepped in, and who was certain he could never be replaced. I have written about that kind of man before, in the company blog, in a post about why no business should let one person hold all the keys.

I am not going to name him or describe him further. He is not the point. The point is that I was in that building every day, with cancer quietly growing in me, drinking at the weekend to get through the next Monday.

“Do not be so happy about your work here. Your position does not depend on your performance. It depends on whether one particular person likes you.”

The one time in my life I asked for help

I need to go back further for this, because it explains more about me than anything else I could tell you.

There was a year when I had five surgeries. Five. In one year. By the end of it I was not a person any more, I was a body that kept being opened and closed. And I was so tired that I did something I have never done before or since.

I asked for psychological support.

Once. That is the only time.

She decided my German was not good enough for her to work with me.

And then she wrote me up. A psychological assessment, from a session I believed was a private conversation between two people, containing a test I did not know I had agreed to.

I found out that document existed this year. Years later.

And suddenly a great deal made sense. Why doctors spoke to me the way they did. Why I was handled like someone whose account of her own body needed checking. There was a piece of paper walking into every room ahead of me and I had never read it.

I am fighting that paper now, and every other line written about me by people who never asked me.

After that I was frightened of the whole idea. I decided I would never sit in front of a psychologist again as long as I lived. I am not telling you to make that decision. I am telling you it is the one I made, and why.

“This is what happens when you hand your life and your health to other people and do not participate in your own. And you only ever do that when you are disconnected from yourself.”

So I took the therapy I had

On the seventh of September 2018, at six in the evening, somebody knocked at my door with a one month old puppy who needed a home.

I thought I was rescuing a dog. I even had to pay for him, which still makes me laugh, and I paid, because by then I had held him and there was no version of that evening where he left.

I know now what actually happened at that door, and it was not me doing somebody a favour.

I like puzzles. I like turning things over until they show me another side. So I will tell you something and you can decide what it is worth: in English, dog spelled backwards is God.

I sometimes worry that saying this is disrespectful. I have thought about it a lot and I do not think it is. His love is the purest and most unconditional thing I have ever been given by anything living, and it is the closest picture I have, here on this earth, of what I understand God's love to be.

He was with me on the floor that night. He has been with me on every single one of the bad days since.

And in the middle of every bottle, I never once forgot to feed him or take him out. Not once. That mattered to me more than I can explain, because it was the proof I kept showing myself that I was still functioning.

But I was not giving him enough. I know that now. I was numb, and you cannot love properly through a wall. You can perform the actions of love. You can feed and walk and stroke. The thing itself does not get through.

So I made him a promise too, and it is the second most serious one I have made. I will do whatever it takes to stay alive until the last day of his life, because I do not believe anybody would love him the way I do.

“That was God knocking, and I did not even know it.”

The morning after the promise

I woke up and I was breathing. So I got up and I started cleaning.

The bottles out of the corners. Every one of them. Then the clothes, all of them, washed, because I had finally smelled them. Then the windows open. Then the curtains, because curtains hold smoke and I had been telling myself for years that smoking in the kitchen did not count.

I was not doing housework. I was taking something out of my house that had been living in it with me.

People will tell you not to stop drinking all at once, that your body will turn on you. I am not giving medical advice and I never will. I will tell you what happened to me, which is that I got the symptoms, all of them, and every single time I wanted a drink I did one of two things. I prayed, or I did something for myself. There was no third option, because I had not left myself one.

The photographs

I started taking pictures of my own face. Not for anybody. For evidence.

And the evidence came in. My skin changed. My nails started growing. My hair came back different. I had energy in the afternoon. I was sleeping properly for the first time in years.

Then one day I was rushing to go out, distracted, and I caught myself in the mirror on the way past. And I stopped. And I went back.

When you start to look like yourself again, you start to like yourself again. And when you start to like yourself again, you stop needing to be numb.

“Who is this person. That is what I thought. Not what has she done. Who is she.”

The Tuesday

Three days after the night on the floor, I went to bed normally and woke up with a tumour in my throat.

Ten centimetres. At the base of my throat. It had not been there on Monday.

It came up the way a bubble comes up through boiling water. I had felt nothing the day before. Nothing at all. That is the part that still amazes me, four years later.

I thought it was COVID again. I went to a doctor and I said look what COVID has done to me.

He said that is not COVID. That is cancer.

I went straight for an ultrasound. The doctor there looked at the screen, then looked at me, and asked me a question I have not stopped hearing since.

“What happened last year? I sent you a result saying there was a metastasis.”

I went. That is what I need you to understand

This is not the story of a woman who did not go to the doctor.

I went. I had the scan done the year before. The result existed. It was written down. Somebody read it.

What I did not have was the result itself, because I had been told I could have a copy of my own results if I paid for them. Around two hundred euros, to read a page about my own body.

What I got instead was a message saying we will see each other in February.

And the arrangement, the one he had set himself, was that he would contact me only if something had changed. So a date in February and no telephone call could mean only one thing.

I kept taking my medication. I kept going to work. I kept getting through Monday to Thursday.

By that Tuesday it was in my neck. Supraclavicular. Cervical. The nodes were full of it.

And I am grateful for that Saturday. I know how that sounds. If I had not stopped three days earlier, if I had not been awake inside my own life for the first time in years, I do not believe I would have run anywhere over a lump I thought was COVID.

“Silence was supposed to mean I was fine. It meant it for fourteen months.”

What I did about it, which is the part people get wrong

I fired him. Obviously I fired him.

And then I did the same thing again with somebody else, because I had not yet learned the actual lesson. New oncologist, same pattern. More treatment, more damage, less of me. Six months of watching a tumour get bigger while being told to stay the course.

Eventually I decided I needed radiation, not as a cure but as a bridge, to buy my body enough quiet for my own immune system to get up off the floor. I fought for it. I had it. And I decided privately that it would be the last treatment I accepted from anybody.

I want to be very clear, because people read fast and hear the wrong thing.

That is the whole difference and it is not a small one. I stopped being a file that gets passed around. I started asking, every single time: what quality of life does this buy me, and who exactly is deciding.

Twenty two months cancer free, as of today. Two years in December.

“I am not telling you to refuse treatment. I am telling you I stopped handing my life to other people.”

And then my hand

I would love to end it there. That would be a good story.

What actually happened is that afterwards I trusted the wrong person again, in a different way, about a different thing, and it cost me the use of my dominant hand.

I am not going to write about that here. Not because it is finished, but because it is not.

The thing I did not expect to save me

I am a data analyst and a software engineer. I have spent my working life taking messy systems apart and finding where the fault actually is, as opposed to where everybody assumed it was.

It never once occurred to me that this would be the skill that kept me alive.

But that is what happened. I started doing to my own body what I had done to other people's systems for twenty years. I pulled my own blood results into my own tracking. I looked for the trend instead of the single number. I asked what changed and when, and I stopped accepting an answer that did not survive the next question.

And when I finally turned that same attention inward, on myself rather than on my data, the diagnosis was not a difficult one.

Every system I have ever been asked to fix had something running in it that nobody had noticed, quietly consuming everything. Mine was alcohol, and the thing underneath the alcohol, which was everything I had never agreed to feel.

I look back now and I can see the road God laid for me, piece by piece, long before I ever needed it. He gave me the exact profession that would let me read my own case. Twenty years of learning to find the fault in a system, so that one day I could find it in myself.

“I had a virus. Not in my body. In my spirit. I was being attacked from the inside, and the attacker was me.”

Connecting the dots backwards

There is a famous line about how you can only connect the dots looking backwards, never forwards. For years I thought that sentence belonged to a man who built computers.

The more I read my Bible, the more I find that every good thing I come across out in the world was already written down two thousand years ago. Every single time. I go looking for the source of something true and it is in there, waiting, long before anybody put it on a stage.

There are mornings now when I open it and the page is so exactly what I needed that I have to stop and sit down.

I used to say somebody knew what I needed. I do not say somebody any more. I love Jesus, I know He is my healer, and I am not going to be vague about it to make it easier to read.

What four years actually looked like

I do not want to leave you with the impression that these were four years of sitting quietly in a chair being brave.

I went through systemic treatment that made me very sick. I watched my sister die. I lost the use of my hand.

I also went to Disney World, because it was a dream I had carried since I was a child. I got my driving licence and I bought a car, for one reason, so I could take my dog to the forest whenever he wants to go. I did a road trip. I stood in front of the Eiffel Tower. I went to the Olympics. I went to Turkey. I went to Asia.

All of it at the same time. In real time. The hospital and the Eiffel Tower in the same year, sometimes in the same month.

“That is what nobody tells you about being ill. Life does not pause and wait for you to finish. It all arrives together.”

About the face we put on

People who carry a lot of pain get very good at one particular thing. We build a face. You will never know what is happening behind it.

If you are sick, you put on the best version you have. You make everybody else comfortable about your illness. You give encouraging advice to people with much smaller problems, and you mean every word of it, while you are in pieces behind your own eyes.

If that is you, then you are my friend. I do not know you and I love you.

Knowing it in your head, and knowing it in your body

You can know something in your head your whole life and it changes nothing. I knew drinking was bad for me. Everybody knows that. It is written on the bottle. Knowing it in my head had no power at all.

Then there is knowing something in your body, which only ever arrives by living it. That kind of knowing does not sit above your neck. It sits lower down, where decisions are actually made.

And the thing nobody told me is that the second kind is not something you receive. It is something you practise. It is not a feeling you have on a good day. It is a thing you do again on the days when you feel nothing at all.

I am not asking you to believe what I believe. I am not trying to convert anybody and I never will. I am telling you what is true for me.

Every time I took the wheel of my own life I drove it into a wall. So I gave God the wheel. I told Him I could not do it any more. He took it, and He brought me somewhere where not everything is perfect, but everything is going to be all right.

And for anyone reading this who does not share that with me, there is a version of this you can still use. Gratitude changes your chemistry. Breathing changes your chemistry. What you repeat to yourself changes the structure of the thing doing the repeating. I wanted a different life, so I had to become someone capable of living one.

“Faith is not what I think about. It is what I practise. I did not learn that from reading. I learned it on my hallway floor.”

So what did I actually do

Almost nothing. That is the honest answer and it is the reason this series exists.

I did not find a miracle. I did not discover a protocol. What I did was stop.

I will get things wrong again. I will probably trust the wrong person again. The difference now is how long it takes me to notice. It used to be years. Now it is days, and on a good day it is minutes.

• <b>I stopped drinking.</b> Completely, on one night, four years ago.
• <b>I stopped smoking.</b> The same night.
• <b>I stopped waiting to be called.</b> If a result exists, I ask for it. Every time. In writing.
• <b>I stopped accepting silence as good news.</b> No news is not good news. No news is no news.
• <b>I stopped letting one person hold my whole life.</b> One opinion is one opinion.
• <b>I stopped signing things I had not read and agreeing to things nobody explained.</b> That one cost me years.
• <b>I stopped apologising</b> for crying, for being tired, for wanting a second opinion. It is my body.
• <b>I stopped letting people who are bad for me sit at my table.</b> That is not cruelty. That is a door.
• <b>I stopped arguing with fear.</b> When it arrives, and it still arrives most mornings, I stop. I close my eyes. I remember that I went through hell and came back with one hand, and that my heart is still going.

If you are reading this on a bad night

I am not going to tell you what to do. I have been told what to do by people who were wrong, and it cost me more than I can write down here.

I will only say this. Before you go looking for the thing that will fix you, look at what you are still doing to yourself. The list is usually shorter than you want it to be, and you usually already know what is on it.

Take the garbage out first. Then we can talk about what to plant.

And today

By rights I should be throwing a party today. Four years is a party. I should be out somewhere, in a restaurant, performing, being congratulated.

Here is what I actually did.

I took my dog out in the car, because he cannot wait in it for five seconds without making a drama about it. I did the shopping for the weekend. I bought a balloon. I came home, and I am sitting here with work to do and my dog lying next to me, eating my favourite cheese.

Later I am going to watch a film and eat something good.

I have a home. I have work. I have him. I have today, which for a long stretch of my life was not a thing anybody was promising me.

“And that is enough. Because I found myself.”

The only reason I wrote any of this down

I want you to know that you can be on the other side of this too.

Not me. You. This is not a story about one woman who got lucky. I have two long stretches of my own life to compare, sixteen years of cancer and then these four years, and the hinge between them is not a drug and it is not a clinic.

It is the exact moment, four years ago today, when I stopped cutting myself into pieces.

True healing starts on the inside. I did not believe that either, for a very long time. I believe it now, and I have the only kind of evidence that ever convinced me of anything, which is that I lived it.

Four years. No alcohol, no cigarettes, cancer free, one hand working, still here, still writing.

What comes next in this series

This part was about what I took out. It had to come first, and that is not an accident of the order, it is the whole argument.

If you keep reading, I am going to tell you, one at a time, the things I put back in. What I take now. Why I take it. What I was looking at when I decided to, and what I was looking at afterwards.

And I am going to say the same thing before every single one of them, so let me say it here first.

That is all I am ever going to ask of you. Not to copy me. To ask. To take one of these to the person looking after you and say, what about this one, for me, with what you know about my case.

Because the thing that nearly killed me was not a treatment. It was fourteen months of not asking.

I see you.

You are not alone.

“What worked in my body will probably not do the same thing in yours. We are not the same machine. But you lose nothing by asking whether it could be.”