I do remember opening my eyes at one point, but not being able to speak. I looked up at Mum, tearful and rubbing my arm as she talked to me.
‘We all love you, Sarah. I miss you, the dogs are missing you. Love you.’ I wasn’t sure if I was dreaming then, but I think now I’d just woken up for a moment. God knows what Mum must have been feeling, knowing I might not come back.
I was in the induced coma for almost two weeks, but when I was first brought out of it, I didn’t wake up. That was a worry for a while. I eventually came round and stayed in intensive care for a further two weeks. During the time I was in the coma, I had no idea about all the things that were happening to me or any of the treatment I was given. Even once I was off the ventilator, I still couldn’t speak properly. All I could do was make these noises that sounded like a chimpanzee trying to communicate.
I hadn’t been awake more than half an hour before I wanted to get up and out of bed, but Mum told me off.
‘You’ve always been like this,’ she said. ‘You’ve always wanted to just get up and go, especially when you’re not allowed.’
That went on for a while. In my head, I was a normal, fit person, all ready to walk away from it all. As far as I was concerned, it was: ‘Thank you very much for all you’ve done. I’ll be off now and back next week for chemo.’
At one point, I really did try to get up, and the nurses freaked out, gently pushing me back down on the bed. There were so many lines, a catheter, wires and God knows what coming out of me. What on earth was I thinking?
‘If you get up off that bed now, it’ll cause a bloodbath if you rip all these lines you’ve got in you,’ one of the nurses said.
It didn’t matter anyway. No matter how much my brain was telling me I needed to move, my body simply wouldn’t comply. It was like being a prisoner, stuck inside myself.
Even when I did eventually try to get up, with help, my legs wouldn’t carry me because of muscle wastage. It was such a weird feeling, not feeling supported, and I’m still struggling with it now.
Of course, when I couldn’t get my own way and go home, I wasn’t best pleased. At one point, one of my close friends spoke to Mum, and the conversation went something like this.
‘How is she doing, Marié?’
‘Well, she told me to fuck off the other day, so …’
‘Right, so she’s getting back to normal then.’
I was probably on so many drugs when I said it, I’m sure I wouldn’t have meant it. Poor Mum!
During the fortnight I was in ICU it was the nights that I found the hardest. Such was the severity of it all that I had to have a nurse with me 24 hours a day, to keep an eye on me. I found myself stressing and worrying about all the things that might have happened to me while I was in the coma. Two weeks of my life, gone. I had thoughts and what felt like memories. None of them were very nice, but I couldn’t work out whether they were flashbacks or dreams – all the scans I’d had, the lumbar punctures, the drips going in and out of me as I slept. The thought that I wasn’t present in the world for all that time scared me. My comfort was those fantastic nurses, who’d kept notes of what was going on every day so they could fill me in now I was awake.
Worse still was the fear I had of sleep. Once I was out of the coma, I forced myself to stay awake for as long as I could, refusing to close my eyes, terrified that if I shut them again, I’d go back under and not wake up. This went on for three days, and one of the nurses, Jude, stayed awake with me for two of them. On the third night, another nurse took over. When Jude came in for her shift later that night, she came in and sat on the other side of the bed.
‘OK, now we’ll all go to sleep together,’ she said.
That night, I finally gave in and agreed to take a sleeping pill. The two nurses put their heads down on either side of my bed, and we all went off to sleep together.
Once I was out of intensive care, I was adamant that I wanted to leave the hospital and recover at home. In the end, the doctor sat me down for a serious talking-to.
‘Look, Sarah, you can barely walk. If you go home now, you’ll be back here in two days for sure. Only this time you’ll probably be even worse.’
It was frustrating. I felt like I’d been in hospital for so long by that point. I just wanted to be out in the fresh air, to look at something ordinary, some real life.
That said, I think I surprised the doctors at how quickly I recovered after coming out of ICU. I had help walking and getting out of bed, plus physiotherapy to show me techniques for movement and gaining back some of my lost muscle mass.
Everyone seemed happy to see me back on the ward. I wanted to be happy and get back to being the comedian there, which had sort of been my default setting while I was there before. I wasn’t quite there yet, though. I think I was in a state of shock at what had happened to me, which isn’t all that surprising really. Everyone understood; they knew it was going to take me a few days to get back to my old self. There were some nights when I’d lie in bed, looking at the space around me, and I’d cry. I was in such despair. I would ask the nurses, ‘How did this happen to me? Why is this happening to me?’
They would just hold me and cuddle me and let me cry. Simply being there for me in a moment where I felt utterly lost.
They’d also stay with me if I had bad dreams or woke up in agony. They’d sit with me until I settled, and chat to me about all sorts of things to take my mind off what was happening. It’s quite unbelievable what these nurses go through for and with their patients. They can be comforting somebody who’s dying one minute and dealing with someone who is angry and wants to fight with them the next. We owed them all so much already. After 2020 and the pandemic, we owe them everything.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
I’m not going to lie, I was crapping my pants before my first dose of chemotherapy. I’d heard people talk about it, and I knew people that had gone through it, but I just didn’t know what to expect or what was going to happen once all that stuff was inside my body. The whole idea of it made me extremely nervous and sick. I just wanted it over with. When I realised it was just a drip, I felt better. What I also didn’t realise was that any side effects weren’t going to happen straight away unless I had some kind of instant allergic reaction to it. Any nasty bits would be further down the line, once the toxic but essential medicine started to do a number on the disease.
While I was in the hospital with plenty of time to kill, I even started to make a little video diary. I figured if I could get through this, maybe talking about it later could help other people who found themselves in the same position. I thought documenting how I felt at the time might be a good memory-jog down the line. Anyway, here’s a snippet of where my head was at that time.
I had my chemo yesterday. It wasn’t as bad as I thought, but now I’m just waiting on the after-effects. All I know is that I’m feeling exhausted today. I had a cold cap on during my chemo to try to save my hair. That’s not necessarily going to work. I do know that I’m going to lose my eyebrows and eyelashes, so who knows if I’m going to hold on to my lovely blonde hair? Actually, there’s not much blonde left anyway. Thanks to the global pandemic, I’m going down with roots!
I’ve had a really shit night. I can’t sleep through. It’s 5.30am, and I’ve woken up almost every hour through the night. It’s not surprising, really. Today I had more scans and more blood tests to find out if my cancer has spread. It’s a waiting game now, I suppose. I’m trying to keep positive, but that’s not something you can brush away, is it? And then there’s the pain; there’s been a lot of that.
I know I must look awful because I don’t even feel like myself any more. It’s the steroids I’ve been taking, they make me look bloated. So much so that I asked the nurse to cover up the mirror in my room because I can’t bear to look at it any more. It feels like something is trying to take over my body, and we’re in a race to try to stop it. The grim reality is, I’ve had to come face-to-face with my own mortality. It’s quite
the pivotal moment, that realisation of all the things you’ve taken for granted, and of how fragile life can be. Also, the thoughts of how different things might have been. How I might have done things differently.
On top of all that, I’m worried about my living situation. At the moment, I’m at my mum’s, complaining like a petulant teenager. I can’t stay there forever. I need to sort out somewhere to live up north because I need to be close to my mum now. There’s no way I can get through this without her by my side. The problem is, many of my friends are down south so I feel cut off. Still, I suppose we’ve all been cut off this year, haven’t we? In fact, after that first treatment, I really didn’t feel anything at all. I just felt like the same person in the same body. I have pictures of that first chemo, and with that cold cap on I looked like I was about to blast off – rocket man!
At first, the chemo didn’t affect me in the way it does some people. Although from what I can gather different people can have varying experiences, depending on the type of chemo they’re having and how their body reacts. For me, sickness wasn’t so much of a problem. My issue has been the awful pain in my joints, particularly my knees when I’m trying to get around. In fact, getting up and down stairs can be an absolute nightmare. The other thing that’s been tough is the steroids. They are supposed to help build you up while you’re undergoing treatment, but they’re also very bloating. The toll they’ve taken on my weight is one of the hardest things I’ve had to deal with. I’ve always been reasonably slim; in fact, during Girls Aloud, when I was literally dancing my arse off, I was a proper ‘skinny bird’! These days, I hardly recognise myself, but steroids are just one of those things I have to endure; they’re a vital part of the treatment.
The other thing about steroids is that they can make you extraordinarily chatty and hyper. I know what you’re thinking – she’s hyper at the best of times, so what the hell is she like on steroids? At one point, it got so bad that a psychiatrist at the hospital suggested it might be a good idea to keep me in for my own wellbeing, but as it turned out, he was way off the mark.
On the day I was due to leave the hospital to go home, I’d been booked in to chat to a psychiatrist after my chemo session.
They wanted to check on me, just to see how I was coping with what had been a traumatic, life-changing event. That day, I’d had an extra dose of steroids in my meds, post-chemo, so by the time I got to see the psych, I was jabbering away, nineteen to the dozen. I mean, can you imagine that vast surge of chemical energy on top of my ADHD? I was on the ceiling, to be honest, so, so happy about the prospect of going home, full of energy and non-stop talking. The other thing was, I had an incredibly dry mouth because of the chemo, so getting the words out as fast as they were coming was quite challenging. This, I’m sure, made me sound even more strange, and there was a certain amount of dribbling going on too. At one point, I noticed the psych and his sidekick peering at me, suspiciously.
‘Sarah, have you taken anything today other than your meds?’
‘What do you mean?’ I asked. ‘I’ve had half an eggcup of medication, and I’ve got a bloody dry mouth. Of course I haven’t taken anything except what I’ve been given.’
‘You haven’t taken anything else?’ he said.
‘No, I’m just excited to leave,’ I said, turning to the other guy in the room. ‘Can you tell him, please? It’s just the medication that’s making me all weird.’
‘I just want to make sure you’re in the right place, Sarah,’ the psychiatrist said.
That was when the other one chipped in. ‘How do you feel about staying in the hospital a little bit longer, in another part?’
That was when the penny dropped; they wanted to put me into the psychiatric ward. They didn’t believe I wasn’t on something other than what I’d been given. I guess that’s a measure of how much the steroids were affecting me.
‘Look, I haven’t taken anything illicit, I just want to go home,’ I said. ‘What the fuck’s wrong with that? Seriously!’
Looking back, I know they were just trying to look after me, but at the time I was angry, not to mention scared.
‘There’s nothing wrong with me other than the steroids,’ I said. ‘I’m going home.’
And guess what – I went home. By that time, I’d been in hospital for almost eight weeks.
When I got back to Mum’s, I did my best to get my head together. The one thing I was clear on was that I didn’t want my cancer diagnosis getting out into the public domain.
‘I don’t want people to know,’ I said to my mum. ‘I can’t deal with all that attention on me, and having people ask questions.’
I didn’t even want all my friends and family to know. At first, I kept it down to Anna and my mum, my lawyer Tricia, and Mousey – that was about it. At that time, I didn’t even tell Fran, who has since been a little pot of gold, helping to look after me through all of this.
People noticed the difference in me, and I could feel it. The effects of the steroids were obviously quite pronounced in me, so there was a couple of times when even my mum asked me if I’d ‘taken something’ while I’d been on them. I suppose because I’ve been in rehab a few times for one thing or another, people who are close to me are often on high alert. When they see such a dramatic change in me, it can cause them to freak out.
I guess the steroids have a similar effect to, say, cocaine in the way that they make a person over-chatty and hyper. I can’t really comment on other drugs, because I don’t have experience with them. I never liked smoking weed, and as for anything else, well, I was always too scared to take anything that lasted more than twenty minutes.
So far, I haven’t lost my hair with the chemo, and that’s because I use the cold cap each time I undergo chemotherapy. For those of you who don’t know, a cold cap is a hat you can wear during some types of chemotherapy treatment. The cooling effect of it reduces blood flow to the scalp, which also reduces the amount of chemo medication that reaches the head. I put it on about fifteen or twenty minutes before my treatment starts, and I have to say, it’s not the most comfortable feeling in the world. It does what it says on the tin, so it’s freezing, and it can give me a headache. With experience, I’ve found that if you can get past the first ten minutes, your head goes completely numb and then you’re OK. Even worse than that, for me, are the cold mittens and slippers that go with the cap, which help to prevent neuropathy – nerve damage in the hands and feet. I can hardly stand the hand mittens – that’s the cold that really goes through me.
For a while, it seemed like the chemo was working. The lumps went down, and the blisters started to fade. I’d been hopeful until I began to notice it all coming back again. I remember thinking, something’s not right here.
As my treatment progressed, I was adamant that I didn’t want the news about my diagnosis getting out. However, there was a little part of me that thought, maybe if I could bring myself to talk about it, it might help some other people who are going through something similar. There had been so much reporting on the news about people missing out on check-ups during Covid lockdown, even though they might be worried about something. People who had left a cancer diagnosis until it might be too late. Maybe if I spoke out, as a public figure, a celebrity, it could help get the message across how important it is to get checked out if you have concerns. That’s something I plan on doing if I can.
As scary as it was to go public about my diagnosis, it was the right thing to do, and the amount of support I’ve received since is incredible. I’ve been inundated with lovely messages from my fans, and I couldn’t love them any more than I do. I’m grateful beyond words for that.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Unlike a lot of people in the entertainment industry, I’m relatively low-key when it comes to social media. In fact, I’d barely been on it for the two years before my diagnosis. Although I did miss chatting with my fans, I felt like it could be a bit of a minefield sometimes. I was always scared of saying the wrong thing and then
being trolled by loads of haters. People who don’t happen to agree with me or haven’t got anything better to do than to make nasty comments from behind the safety of a computer keypad. Even with an announcement about my cancer diagnosis, I was worried about saying the wrong thing and getting involved in some political row or having to read random people’s opinions about me. Especially if I didn’t like what they had to say.
At the start of 2020, Peter Loraine texted me, just to say hi and see how I was doing. After that, we’d just started chatting again from time to time – catching up on WhatsApp about our dogs and various other things. A few months later, once I’d got my cancer diagnosis, he was still messaging, but by then I was finding it hard to get back to people. I just didn’t know what to say to anyone. In the end, Peter sent me a text asking if I was OK, as he was a little bit worried that he hadn’t heard from me. I looked at the message and thought about it for a moment. Peter was always somebody I felt I could trust. Perhaps he might be able to help me find a way to deal with any unwanted media attention if someone got wind of what was happening.
I texted Peter back: If I tell you something very personal, can you promise not to tell anyone else? If so, I might need your help.
Peter promised to keep my secret, so I texted to say that I’d been diagnosed with breast cancer. He was shocked and upset, of course, but when we spoke on the phone, he was calm and understanding.
‘The reason I asked if I can trust you is that I don’t want anyone to know,’ I told him. ‘I can’t deal with the press and other people’s opinions. For now, I just want to keep it close.’
Later, on a Zoom call, I explained to Peter in more depth.
‘Right now, the only people who know are you, Mum, Mousey and Anna – that’s it, I said. I can’t tell anyone else because there are so few people I trust.’
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