I had a funny year.
It’s still January. I can technically get away with a year-in-review kind of post. So this is what this is. If you’ve had it with posts like these, you have been forewarned.
If you landed on this post, you’re probably in my small circle of friends who subscribed to this newsletter (thank you!), and who already know that earlier this year, I discovered a tiny little fucker of the tumour variety lurking in one of my breasts. I say ‘I’ discovered, when it’s really a team of consultant oncologists, radiologists, surgeons, a&e doctors and countless nurses; a small medical village.

Triple-negative invasive ductal carcinoma is the official name. I call it Little Fucker, rolls out of the tongue faster. A rare and aggressive type of breast cancer most likely caused by the treatment I received for the first cancer I had back when I was 16 during my bout with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. To treat my lymphoma, I received radiotherapy to my chest (where some of the affected lymph nodes were). The doctors believe that the radiation mutated my breast tissue. Fast-forward 17 years and the mutant little fucker popped up sometime between the summers of 2022 and 2023 like an ugly reminder that no matter how well you think you’re doing, your past always has a way of sneaking up on you in the most unexpected ways. I spent the better part of the last 17 years terrified of a relapse. If caught early, Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is not a terrible diagnosis as far as cancers go. Prognoses are generally good— most patients make a full recovery with sustainable remissions that could sometimes be festively (if a little charitably) referred to as a cure. But the fear of relapse never goes away. No matter how long you spend in remission land, you’re always reminded that you’re a visitor; a tourist with no route for permanent residency or indefinite settlement.
Here I am, 34 years old, facing mutiny from my own Danny DeVitos. So not raven.
I joked a lot in the beginning of 2023 declaring it ‘The Year of Kathy’, when my life seemed to be on track for a lot of what I wanted and worked really hard for: I loved my job, I enjoyed my creative side hustles, I began writing again after years of a crippling block where I could only communicate in memes, and I was surrounded by wonderful people that filled every vacancy in my life. I was happy, and the turn of the year seemed as good a milestone as any for me to brazenly and loudly announce that The Year of Kathy is upon us.
Boy was I wronging in all the wrongs very wrongly.
June brought the diagnosis, and with it a treatment plan that seemed so intensively disproportionate to the fact that the cancer was caught at an early stage and was still quite small. But the little fucker is so pathologically horrendous, the doctors laid out a cocktail of every cancer treatment available: a six-month course of four different chemotherapy drugs, with a weekly phase and a three-weekly one, followed by surgery, followed by seven more months of immunotherapy, and potential additional chemo after that.
I’m exhausted just writing that.
Cancer treatment is very much a trust-the-process sort of thing. It’s more art than science as it stands now in 2024. Science is precise, calculated, accurate, targeted. You know what’s none of these things? Chemotherapy. You spray and pray in hopes that the poisonous chemicals kill the parts of you that need killing and spare the bits that keep you alive.
As grateful as I am for this poison, it’s killed more of me this time than anyone had hoped. Four hospitalisations, three minor surgeries, four serious infections, chemo-induced menopause, countless rounds of antibiotics and blood infusions, and a fuckload of painkillers, and here I am, two weeks away from the BIG surgery: the much anticipated yeetus of the teetus. Lights out — goodbye cancer boobs, you don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.
I feel bad for my body. Between hair loss, steroids moon-face, extremely dry skin, the inability to regulate temperature or to walk a few steps without needing to rest, a nonexistent immune system, losing my breasts and my period, I wonder when do you stop being you and start being someone else? There’s a lot of me I don’t recognise now, and it happened very quickly. I went from heavy weight-lifting four times a week, working a full time job and doing my own creative work in the evenings, to barely being able to lift my head off the pillow or put a sentence together.
Perhaps the most surprising thing about the past seven months is the strange affinity I’ve developed for hospitals. Unlike a lot of patients (and most people), I never really hated them, but I seem to have trauma-bonded with King’s College Hospital’s A&E department. The blues and whites of the medical staff, the beeping of IV drip machines, the smell of sanitising swabs, it’s all become very comforting to my senses: it’s the place where I don’t have to worry about passing out when I’m too dizzy to walk, or about people’s gaze when they immediately clock the cancer features on my face. At the hospital, there are no shocked faces or looks of pity — there’s always someone sicker than you.
The reason I’m writing this now is because there’s a fear inside of me that I don’t want to fossilize. And selfishly, this little Substack arrangement has enough people reading it to make me feel seen but not enough to make me feel exposed. This is a journal entry I am sharing because I’m finding it difficult to speak about this when asked, and I hope it can make sense of this crazy year I’ve had.
And as I write this, I am experiencing the worst cancer side-effect I’ve had to date: an overwhelming feeling of not wanting to do anything. I know it’s January, and everyone is feeling it at the moment, but I am terrified that this feeling won’t go away. I had a generous allocation of spoons in my pre-cancer life, and I now seem to spend my time desperately trying to locate one. And yet, a swift textual analysis of what I’ve written so far on this post tells me that I’ve used the words ‘hope’ and ‘hoping’ about four or five times. Redundancy and poor language aside, I seem to be somehow full of hope, perhaps despite my better judgment. I am genuinely surprised that I appear to refuse to allow the sink sands of this experience to swallow me despite their very sophisticated attempts to.
Today is a low day, but with much of that hope, and with guarded optimism for what this year has to bring, I leave you with this series of pictures of how 2023 went for me, hoping for better days, more spoons, and less A&E visits.



Thank you for taking the time to read this.
Love,
Kathy
I wish you all the good luck and healing you thoroughly deserve. You are inspirationally brave.
Seconding what Jack said. You write so well. Oh how I adore your brilliant mind 🩷 Sending you love & doing this 🖕to the little fucker. And in the interim I will get plotting our reunion in Beirut (and before that London) x With love, always, Liv x