A moment that changed me: my son was relishing life after recovering from cancer – so why did I feel broken?

It is not my place to describe in intimate detail what happened to my teenage son. Suffice to say, in 2021 he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, had a 12.5-hour operation on his 14^th birthday to remove half of his upper jaw, and then went through eight months of intensive chemotherapy. For most of a year, he spent more time in the hospital than out. If he wasn’t being monitored for chemo drugs, he was being treated for their side-effects: the nausea, the fainting, the headaches, the nosebleeds that wouldn’t stop. “We don’t give this course of chemo to adults,” said the oncologist. To my raised eyebrows, she answered: “They wouldn’t be able to take it.”

Covid meant that only his dad and I were allowed, one at a time, on the cancer ward. It was a surreal world of blue curtains, masked nurses and endlessly beeping machines. During my 10-hour shifts, I tried to encourage edifying activities such as French practice or reading, but most of the time my son and I either slept or watched crap television. The hospital didn’t have the internet, so we overdosed on episodes of Dinner Date, Taskmaster and reality renovation shows. When my son was well enough, we laughed at everything, pretending to ignore the tall bags of neon-yellow chemo-poison draining into the tube in his chest. I tried to keep his (and my) spirits up by planning what we would do after his treatment was over – a horse trek in Iceland, a gig at Wembley. Each week, we counted off the chemotherapy remaining: “Only 18 more weeks to go”; “We’re halfway through”; “We’ve completed the doxorubicin and cisplatin, now there’s only the methotrexate to get through.” When things got bad, I promised him: “One day this will be over. Life will be back to normal.”

Then the treatment finished, and after MRIs, scans and blood tests, my son was pronounced clear. In the weeks that followed, I watched with joy as his hair, eyelashes and eyebrows grew back and he stopped resembling a sickly medieval Madonna. I blew my savings on the now fabled trip to Iceland and the pristine air, riding and long hikes restored his colour. His dad took him caving in the Wye valley. He went to his first gig at Wembley. In September, he was able to take himself off to school for the first time in a year, his blue knapsack crammed with GCSE books. He was gaming online with his friends, improvising jazz on the piano and, to everyone’s delight, won a cross-country race at school. By every measure, his life was back on course.

I was astonished and grateful. We were the fortunate ones.

Then the second wave of grief hit. I lay about, unable to fulfil my daily objectives as a freelance writer. My to-do lists, when I got around to making them, found their way down the back of the sofa.

“You should be happy, you idiot,” I kept telling myself. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the future my son had lost. The future in which he never had reason to question his own physical perfection, where he hadn’t missed a whole year of friendship-building, where he bore no physical or mental scars. I struggled to reconcile myself to the fact that, unlike his schoolmates, his new future would involve reconstructive surgery, a lifetime of intermittent tests, the spectre of late side-effects from chemotherapy. No matter that he himself was busy relishing life – the wonder of spiced pumpkin Frappuccinos, the joy of playing Brahms, afternoon tea with his beloved grandad. No matter that the only time he looked even vaguely depressed was when I was preaching about the health benefits of linseeds and shiitake mushrooms, or interrogating him about his friendship group. I was paralysed by the fear that his gruelling year and its aftermath would set him too much apart from his peers, that it would be impossible for him to thrive.

A series of chance conversations over the course of a week changed my morose outlook. I learned that a friend’s child had been afflicted with a dreadful bladder disorder that the doctors couldn’t explain. The next day, a breast surgeon told me of the women she sees with extra nipples, or third breasts that emerge in adolescence near their armpits. “These things are remarkably common,” she said, brightly. Later the same day, someone described to me her teenager’s ongoing difficulties with autism. Another friend told how a relative whose mother is in prison for drug-related offences was being unfairly typecast at school.

I am not happy that these things happen. But the stories about the different challenges young people can face did remind me that having something go a bit – or a lot – wrong in one’s adolescence isn’t an experience restricted to a tiny minority. Out of curiosity, I Googled statistics. Around 1% have epilepsy, 2-5% have some form of facial disfigurement, 2-3% have scoliosis, 1% have atypical genitalia, 10% are dyslexic. The list goes on and on and the numbers add up and up. When you consider the non-physical hurdles adolescents can face – difficult adoptions, poverty, bereavement, racism – it would stand to reason that by the time we reach adulthood, most of us have had to contend with some form of something.

This in itself, of course, didn’t cheer me up, but it did help me stop worrying about how singular my son’s experience was. What did cheer me up was just looking around and realising that most of us, provided we have enough of the right love, survive pretty well. In fact, it is often the act of overcoming our something that empowers us with resilience and a keener capacity for empathy.

At the end of the week, I was jogging with a friend, and I told her these thoughts. She agreed, and we both admitted to having somethings of our own. Somethings that we’d rather not have had mar our teenage years, but which didn’t hold us back. Over the course of our conversation, I felt myself coming to a begrudging accommodation with my son’s new future. But I still felt deeply sad. At the end of the run, I confessed: “I feel a bit broken, like I’m on a precipice. I’m meeting an acquaintance I haven’t seen in 20 years for coffee. She’s done amazing things with her life, and I don’t want her to see me this way.”

My friend just laughed and jogged off, shouting over her shoulder: “Find out what her something is!”

And I knew then that both I and my son would be fine.