Pick Me Up! 09-Sep-2021

My hands shook as I read the letter again. I had been for a routine mammogram a couple of weeks ago, but I thought it was all fine. It was August 2020, and I had just got home from a holiday to find a letter from the hospital. It said the mammogram had shown something unusual, and they needed to do more investigations to be sure. Within a week, I was in Bolton Hospital having an ultrasound scan and a biopsy. Soon after, I got a call to say I had breast cancer in two areas. My head started spinning. All I could think about was how this was going to affect my daughter, Rebekah-Jo Goldman, who was 12 at the time. The doctors couldn’t say at this point how…

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As a child, my youngest son was a huge challenge. Sean was born on 20 July 1997 and from the get-go, I had my hands full with him. He was constantly crying and pulling things. And boy did he hit the terrible twos hard. He would have the worst tantrums until he got what he wanted and regularly attacked his siblings, Charlotte, now 27, and Adam, now 26. I couldn’t understand why he was like it. The eldest two were such calm, lovely children and rarely misbehaved. But Sean was completely out of control. When he was three-years-old, he spat at my mum Christina, 74, after we asked him to put his Christmas presents upstairs. And when he was only four, he threw our beloved cat out of the window.…

However, after a few days, he was gripped to his phone again, and didn’t speak to me. And just a week later, Sean snapped once again. We ordered a takeaway, and after I dished up, I realised I’d forgot the cutlery. ‘Please can you go and get the knives and forks?’ I asked Sean as he was sat right by the kitchen door. ‘No, you get them,’ he groaned at me. ‘Sean, you’re next to the door,’ I said, exhausted. His anger bubbled and he continued to refuse to move. Sighing, I gave up and went to get them myself. Only, as I walked into the kitchen, I felt Sean smack me round the back of the head and I crashed to the floor. ‘What are you doing?’ I cried…

Sitting in front of the doctor during my 18-week pregnancy scan, in November 2020, I could tell he looked slightly concerned. ‘It appears you have twin-to-twin transfusion syndrome (TTTS),’ the doctor told me. I remembered back to when I was told that I had MCDA twins during my first scan - meaning they were twins that shared a placenta which made them higher risk babies. But I didn’t think anything would come of it as I’d already had two healthy children, Isabelle, eight, and Noah, four. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked, worried. He explained it is to do with abnormal connecting blood vessels in the placenta, which results in an imbalanced blood flow between the twins. This means one baby has a greater volume of blood than the other.…