An Impossible Choice

On seeking acceptance and discovering grace after a cancer diagnosis.

Anyone who has heard the words ‘you have cancer’ knows how silently they land, how the room fades to grey, faces blur, explanations about ‘next steps’ evaporate into thin air.

In May 2016, at the age of 49, I was diagnosed with Stage 3, Grade 3 breast cancer, the smallest of tumours, yet it had already invaded my lymph nodes and was rapidly growing.

A confident oncologist predicted a recurrence within six months to two years unless I threw ‘everything’ at it. By ‘everything’ he meant chemotherapy, radiotherapy, and ten years of medication, after surgery. But I have a rare and volatile bleeding disorder that was unlikely to survive ‘everything’.

I wanted to explore my options, but the oncologist simply laughed when I asked how many patients he’d treated with a bleeding disorder. Visiting the chemotherapy ward offered no alternative. A sympathetic nurse, with over 20 years of experience, gently shook her head when I asked the same question. My final avenue of hope lay in cancer charities, but there was still no record of any patient even refusing chemotherapy, much less someone with a rare bleeding disorder.

I faced an impossible choice:

Option 1: Accept chemotherapy and risk side effects that might reduce my life expectancy to weeks. This wasn’t melodrama. My earliest memories are of losing my mum to a bleeding disorder within days.

Option 2: Decline it. I survived surgery thanks to treatment that encourages my platelets to cooperate temporarily. But that was a single procedure, not months of treatment.

After my diagnosis, I locked myself away for 48 hours. Terrified and nauseous, unable to eat or sleep.

What was I afraid of? I kept returning to that question. I had tentative faith, and if I truly believed what I professed, that this world isn’t all there is, that I would see my loved ones again, then why was I afraid? If we are truly safe, then death is nothing to fear.

I didn’t pray for healing.

Of course I desperately wanted it, but I still carried the quiet futility of unanswered prayers. After my brother’s death at 20, I’d raged at God, begging to turn back time, praying to wake up in a world where he still lived.

Instead, the healing I sought was freedom from the fear of my own mortality, to reach a place of acceptance, to make treatment decisions from a place of clarity rather than one of fear.

Richard Rohr writes: “Death is not just physical dying, but going to the full depth of things, hitting the bottom, beyond where you are in control.”

I needed to go to the full depth of things, that place beyond ourselves where nothing is impossible. I had to face my mortality.

I had to get ‘comfortable’ around dying, because if I could trust that death would be a safe place, I might rise from my fear.

In a hot tub, in the stillness of a Yorkshire retreat, I lay under the unreachable stars of late May as I led myself quietly to the edge of life, to a hospice bed, until I was there, surrounded by the people who loved me.

And I sobbed.

I sobbed for myself, for my son, whose 20 year old partner was diagnosed with an extremely rare cancer just six months before me.

I sobbed for the years I might not have, for the years lost to grief.

I wept for the brief lives of those I loved. For the unfairness and suffering of life, and this impossible choice I faced.

Yet through the silence, through recognising my need to let go, I discovered a flicker of peace. As I gazed on the infinite cosmos, I realised those distant stars would still burn fiercely centuries after my life ended.

And I wept again.

Yet in the stillness, I was tenderly drawn into that place where nothing is impossible. Where everything is OK, even when it’s not.

I lost the fear. I was able to refuse treatment after surgery, all of it, chemotherapy, radiotherapy, the drugs, still drowning in voices of uncertainty, mostly my own, but knowing that I carried a bleeding disorder that was only sleeping.

The oncologist abruptly left the consulting room without a word when I advised him of my decision. We haven’t communicated since that day in 2016. As I was guided towards the exit, the nurse who’d quietly witnessed our exchange whispered, ‘It was the right decision’.

At my first review six months later, the nurse practitioner asked how I’d coped with my chemotherapy. My notes lay in a folder, unread.

Fear still floated effortlessly in and out of my life, the voices of medical professionals and echoes of self-doubt questioning every step of my decision-making process.

But, thanks be to God, in June 2026 it will be ten years since my surgery.

Ten years ‘no evidence of disease’, although I do not take for granted the inherent fragility and fleeting nature of life. I am still four months from that ten year mark as I write, and I know that tomorrow is not promised.

I also tread gently on sacred ground here. Cancer is unpredictable, regardless of treatment, and I do not suggest that anyone follow my solitary path.

I can only speak for my own body, my own impossible choice, my own mortality.

Life remains a constant balancing act between my rational mind and what I know to be true in my soul.

A year after my diagnosis, I was selected for ordination training. I was ordained in 2020, in the middle of a pandemic. Without cancer, I would not be a priest. I work quietly, on the margins.

But I need to say this, that I would trade it all, the collar, the calling, whatever wisdom I have gained, to have never faced that consulting room, that choice, that walk to the edge of mortality, where I still wander.

Where we all wander, in truth.

Transformation is not the same as redemption. Perhaps some things cannot, or should not, be redeemed.

I would not be the woman I was before my cancer diagnosis. Not because she was a terrible person but because she was marked by tragic loss, struggling to tread water, scrambling for an elusive normality that never came.

But here I am, inching my way to a ten year anniversary. Still checking the margins of every scan, still holding my breath at every appointment, and still unable to open that envelope carrying my results every year it arrives.

Each day is gift. I first knew the truth of those words as a nine year old girl who suddenly lost her mother. But now I know it differently, I know it from the other side of the precipice.

I’m still here, today, right now, against all expectations.

And for that I am deeply grateful.

And it is enough.