In January 2008 she got the news it was cancer and it wasn’t any ordinary cancer, it was a Grade 3 aggressive cancer. Again I remember saying “hey, hang on what do you mean aggressive?”. It was a word I didn’t like to hear and a word that would come to haunt me. Again, she tried to reassure me, “don’t worry that how it’s grown, it will be ok”.
She underwent a lumpectomy and she had all her lymph glands tested. The results said it hadn’t spread to her lymph nodes or the surrounding area around the lump. I was overjoyed and remember thinking, it’s 9 months of treatment and then back to life being normal. I even said to her “just think of it as if you’re pregnant…9 months and it’s all over with”.
To a degree, she flew through treatment. She lost her hair and sometimes she’d look awful but most of the time, she looked really good. I went up north a few times for a week at a time to do the chemo run and she was remarkably fine, considering she was having poison pumped into her body.
In August 2008 she was with me in South Wales, she had switched from injected chemo to tablet chemo and it was in my house that she took her last chemo. It also happened to be the last time she came to visit me in South Wales.
By the September of 2008 she really wasn’t getting any better. She had found a second lump and she had this chronic backache. To make matters worse, they’d given her morphine for the pain. I knew the minute she said they’d given her morphine that things weren’t good.
I travelled up to see her on a Sunday in the October, to spend the day with her with every intention of coming home on the Monday. Other friends tried to prepare me for how she looked, but not even their warning words could have prepared me for the reality. How I did not collapse with grief on seeing her, I’ll never know. It was clear to see she was dying. That night I almost broke myself in two crying.
Treas had a doctor’s appointment the next day but she actually ended up in hospital, and it was then, on the Monday, that they told her the cancer had spread to her liver, lungs and bones. It was also when they told her it was incurable.
Treas and her fiancé, Paul, had planned a wedding for the following February so we set about bringing it forward. We didn’t know how long she’d got left and it was something her husband Paul never wanted to know. She was having chemo to try to slow it down. She was due to have 12 treatments but in the end, she had about 8. That last new year was awful. As 11:30 pm rolled around, she woke and I wished her a happy new year. What else could I say?
She went downhill fast and on the 5th January 2009, she went into hospital. Her oncologist came to see her and said that the cancer had pushed on through the chemo and that it was no longer having any effect.
