The Eggnog that Saved my Life

Seeing it in black and white came as a shock. A young local reporter referred to me as ‘another elderly resident’. This was the first time anyone had described me as ‘elderly’.

‘Don’t believe everything you read in the papers,’ he replied, as I tackled him in jest.

A 27-year-old man wasn’t expected to know whether or not a 79-year-old, white-haired lady was offended by his description.

My family and friends kept reminding me of my approaching birthday on the 2nd April and indicated that they were expecting a party. Yes. It merited a special celebration.

Twenty-four years ago it looked extremely unlikely that I would see another birthday, having been diagnosed with advanced cancer of the colon. The surgeon made no secret of the fact that at that stage there was little hope of survival. I went into hospital, not expecting to come out again.

My daughter, Anna, was thirteen years old. We had always been very close and completely dependent on one another. Our separation devastated us but I was so ill that there was nothing either of us could do about it.

‘I shall never grow old. Nor will my sight and hearing ever fade. The aches and pains of old age will never trouble me.’ I comforted myself with these and similar words but I wept for Anna.

As I lay hovering between this world and the next after the operation, my body was worn out from pain, weakness, and sobbing. At that stage, it would have been so easy to surrender to the inevitable. An Israeli lady, working as an orderly on the ward, came and laid her hands on my head. Through a haze the words, ‘Fight. Don’t give up,’ reached me. Her touch was cool on my fevered brow, and a strange power seemed to pass from her to me. She told me that she had used this power to comfort dying soldiers in the Arab-Israeli War. A prayer formed on my lips - ‘Please, God, spare me for as long as Anna needs me.’

In 1984 nurses had time to spend with patients who needed extra care. One, in particular, became very close to me and she put her arms around me, holding me tight before bursting into tears, saying that she would be in trouble for becoming so emotionally involved with a patient. Her tears suggested she knew I was dying. The head nurse had been rather hard on me, making me walk about briskly as I cried out in pain, but she, too, showed compassion. ‘I am doing it for your own good,’ she explained. She was moving to a new job and one of her leaving gifts was an electric mixer.

‘I want you to be the first to benefit,’ she declared, as she whipped up an egg, adding a glass of sherry and hot milk. ‘Here. Drink this. It’s delicious. Having eaten no solid food for several months, I was like a skeleton from Belsen. That eggnog saved me. It restored my appetite.

All night long my sobbing kept me awake and the nurse on duty would come with a cup of freshly brewed tea and words of comfort.

After three weeks I left hospital, knowing that the cancer had already spread to the lymph glands before the surgeon removed them. ‘I have done all that I can,’ he announced. ‘Your life now rests in God’s hands.’

An article in a newspaper stated that 23,000 people in Britain fall victim to cancer of the colon every year and that 18,000 of these die. The 5,000 who survive have caught it in its early stages when it is curable. These statistics were terrifying and my situation seemed clear. What lay before me was a journey I would have to face alone.

While adjusting to the frustrations of coping with this enormous burden, I read about a young research doctor in London, Vicky Clement-Jones, who was similarly facing the likelihood of losing her battle with advanced ovarian cancer. Like me, she was upset by the secrecy surrounding the disease and people’s reluctance to say the word ‘cancer’. She launched a support organisation - ‘BACUP’ - and I contacted her.

Letters passed back and forth between us till her death in 1987. In her final letter, written on her death-bed, she asked me to go on flying the flag when others lost the battle. Vicky filled me with hope. I knew what I had to do – go on fighting. I was among those who were invited to her memorial service in St Paul’s Cathedral, but by then a full-time teaching job kept me from attending.

It is hard when another person loses the battle, but Vicky had inspired me with the will to fight and think positively. On reading ‘Cancer Ward’ by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, I concentrated on one thing he said - that those who gave in, died, but those who fought, survived. Anna was my guiding star, my reason for living.

Every morning, in the months and years ahead, I would look up at the sky, and the beauty of the world would strike me afresh. It was good to be alive. As the first snowdrops appear each spring, I still sing and dance for joy.

I remember helping with a street collection for the Samaritans on my 60th birthday. Calling out, ‘I’m sixty today. Help the Samaritans,’ encouraged people to dig deep into their pockets. It was wonderful to be sixty. How could I have visualised then that I’d reach 80? . My life over the past 24 years has been full of adventures and challenges, undreamed of in my younger days. Anna and eight of her wonderful explorer/adventurer friends came to stay with me for my 77th birthday and they gave me a day to remember. In the afternoon I went cycling over Cannock Chase with a top British cyclist.

Last September and again in December I travelled to Northern Lapland and enjoyed activities such as kayaking alone down a remote river and riding a skidoo across a frozen lake that I had previously canoed across.

Now, my 80th birthday has come and gone and the celebrations lasted for 12 days. On Anna’s card she wrote, ‘We’ll make your 90th even bigger, Mum.’ That is something to aspire to.

We have three ages - how we see ourselves, how others see us, and, finally, our chronological age. It doesn’t really hurt to be described as ‘an elderly resident’.