It feels a little weird to sit down and write a blog centred around a wedding. Usually, I feel like I understand my role in writing the blog – I describe gritty scenes of hospitals and feeling unwell, demanding the reader’s sympathy, all to make myself feel better about the predicament I find myself in. So where does a wedding fit into a cancer blog? Well, it was my wedding, and I have cancer… or I had cancer. I’m not sure what is technically correct right now. Until I’ve finished the mop-up chemotherapy, I don’t feel like I can say I’m cancer free, but the sugeron did tell me that I was technically ‘cancer free’ before I was discharged from his care. Considering I have just had another scan on Friday, I’m not going to curse it and start ringing the bell of success just yet. That would be tempting fate. Let’s say I do still have cancer, for now.

The wedding date was Friday, September 16th. Despite there being a few days of rain prior to the day itself, the sun showed up for the event. We did personally invite it, so it would have been rude if it had shunned us. Another issue had been looming over the event, though. Rail strikes were planned across England and were majorly impacting the train services which many of our guests would be using to get to the venue. In the weeks leading up to the wedding day, I was receiving more and more messages from friends stating that their trains had been cancelled. One friend who was travelling from France had messaged me to tell me that the Eurostar train service from France to England had even been cancelled, and she was having to seek an alternative route to the wedding. Everything was going wrong. Then, Queen Elizabeth sadly died the week before the wedding, and all train strikes were called off. The circumstances were unfortunate, but they did benefit us. Perhaps the omens surrounding the wedding weren’t so bad after all.

I started the day in my own bed, alone. Anna had stayed with her family in their Airbnb. A sudden panic had come over me as I had no idea where Anna’s wedding ring was, and whether I was supposed to have it. She didn’t inform me that she was going to ignore me all morning, but I got an inkling that this was occurring when she ignored my 3 calls to her that morning. Her mum rang me back a few minutes later, fulfilling her apparent role as ‘messenger’. Luckily, Anna and her mum had the ring. It then occurred to me, however, that I didn’t know who was supposed to have the rings for the ceremony. I understood it was the ringbearer, but who was the ringbearer? It should have been our dog Lucy, but we doubted the venue would allow it. Anna’s mum, Kathy, also would not have allowed the wedding to go ahead if we had actually given Lucy the rings, so the dream was already dead.

I took an executive decision and gave my wedding ring to Keiran, my brother-in-law, and our new ringbearer. The decision was very thought out. “You can be the ringbearer,” I retorted to his complaints that he didn’t have a role at the wedding. Keiran’s thirst for attention needed to be sated somehow, so it seemed an easy fix to both problems. When it came to presenting the rings during the ceremony, he made a huge song and dance out of the whole affair, ensuring he was stood at the front for as long as possible. ‘Forgetting’ which pocket which ring was in, and taking as long as possible to dig them out and pass them over, Keiran made the most of his 5 minutes of fame. “Keiran nearly did a good job,” the registrar said at the end of the ceremony. Even she was sick of his antics; I’ve been putting up with them for 7 years now.

The day went very quickly, as everyone always tells you it does. I could barely breathe between conversations and was constantly getting dragged in twenty directions. All the nerves I felt came at the start of the day, when people started to arrive outside of the venue. Once the ceremony started, they mostly dissipated, only coming back again as the speeches began. My speech was third out of the four, and I sat trying to focus on what was being said in the speeches that came before me, but with one half of my brain focused on the impending speech that I’d have to deliver. Things went very similarly to my nerves at the start of the day, I felt incredibly nervous at first, but after a few of the routine jokes went down well and I really started to believe that I had the room on my side, it got easier. I then got to enjoy my best man’s speech with impunity. All of the speeches were great, and it was interesting to see all of the different approaches taken during them.

By the evening part of the wedding, I was starting to feel tired out. I lasted until about 23:00, though, which is much better than I thought I’d manage at the start of the day. Aside from the guilt of not speaking to anyone enough, the day went as well as we could have hoped it would. I thought that I’d suffer from a huge lull once it was all over. It has been a beacon of light ever since we set the date around 7 months ago; a safety net that was there to support is no matter how bad things were getting in the present. Strangely, I’ve felt quite the opposite. It has felt easy to appreciate that it was an amazing day, but that it is over now.

There is a comfort knowing that it all went so well, and that I am now happily married. I think it is a lesson that I have been learning over the past 12 months. As you adjust to a new standard of life, and a new reality that you exist in, one which requires you to be ever more conscientious of the fragility of it all, you learn to really enjoy something for what it is. We cannot go back and relive special days like our wedding day, we can only breathe life into those memories by chatting with friends and family about them, looking at the pictures and re-experiencing the key components – things like the first dance song or the main course that you chose. That has to be enough once the day is over. If it is not, you will mourn the fact that you can’t do it all again, and it will tarnish how you special it all was. Anna and I have been listening to our first dance song a lot in the past week. It’s been lovely.

After the wedding, we spent a night away at a very nice hotel called The Tawny in Stafforshire. We could only get one night at such short notice, which was unfortunate. It has lovely grounds around it, and we spent a few hours walking around and discovering some of the hidden treasures. We randomly found a tennis table as we walked along a path, and Anna proved just how terrible her hand-eye coordination is. It was good fun. I couldn’t take advantage of the hot tob like she could, as the wound on my abdomen is still open and at risk of getting infected. I sat next to the hot tub reading whilst she enjoyed the bubbles. It was a nice way to spend the evening and definitely made it feel special, as we would not usually do something like that so off the cuff. Perhaps we should start being more impulsive like this, but I have 3 more months of chemotherapy to get through first, which is why we hadn’t booked a proper honeymoon yet.

This week it has been back to the hospital appointments. On Thursday I had a meeting with a diabetes specialist nurse at Manchester Royal Infirmary. The nurse told me that she only did two days a week as a diabetes nurse at the hospital, and spent the others as a sports nutritionist for a university. As a result, we ended up speaking a lot about running and its impact on your body. I told her that I was starting to consider running again, and that I had been running throughout my first bout of chemotherapy. She wasn’t impressed. I didn’t know this, but she told me that your lungs and respiratory system are very vulnerable during and after running. With my body going through so much, with the chemotherapy, surgery, and with the upcoming chemotherapy, she told me that I should be careful. I asked her how long she would suggest waiting before starting again, and she responded that she would wait until at least 6 months after finishing chemotherapy. I was quite shocked, actually. It was a helpful conversation as it has convinced me not to start running too soon, but I’ll inevitably ignore her advice. I’m already itching to get out again and I haven’t even started the final 3 months of chemotherapy. Before I start chemotherapy, however, I have to receive more scan results.

On Friday, I had another CT scan at The Christie, checking for tumours in my body. It is never fun attending scans, and the period in between having the scan and receiving the results is never nice either. I’m still feeling very in the middle of the treatment, so I don’t feel too nervous about it. I think it is quite unlikely that a tumour would have taken hold in the time since my surgery, so that makes me feel better. My life hasn’t really returned to normal anyway, though, so I don’t feel like I have very much to lose right now. If I heard another tumour had started to grow somewhere, it would just mean more fighting. I don’t feel like I’ve left that mode in my mind yet, so fighting on would just be a continuation of the current status quo. It’ll be much harder to cope with the scans if I get to 2 years clear, and I have established a ‘normal’ life again. That will be when it risks completely unturning everything again, like my original diagnosis did. For some reason, I feel like a lot more hangs in the balance in that situation. Perhaps this is all just me rationalising why these results aren’t too important, making me feel better about them. Who knows. For now, it’s back to work, back to scans and back to the ‘real’ world. Anna and I had a few days where we treated ourselves, but it all needed to end at some point.

Sorry for disappearing on the blog again – it was a very busy period. I’ll be back to it properly from next week, complaining about having my blood taken and delving into all the doom and gloom of having/not having cancer. I have so much complaining to do about diabetes that I’m considering writing a book titled ‘Don’t Lose Your Pancreas’, which would be all about how fucking annoying life gets if you do indeed lose your pancreas. Maybe I should call it ‘Dancreas Pancreas’, actually. It sounds like a spell from a Harry Potter book, though. Maybe I’ll write some fan fiction where the world of diabetes crosses over with the world of Harry Potter. Instead of having a scar on his head, Harry could lose his pancreas and then have to manage his blood sugar whilst he tries to fight 3 headed dogs and woo Ginny. That’s probably the only way it’ll actually sell. At least I’ve got a plan for the book now. That’ll distract me from the fact that the wedding is over and I’ve got scan results coming up on Thursday…