I am trying to imagine what a film announcing my recovery from cancer would have looked like. Probably a bit like a trailer for a new zombie film rather than a Flake advert. Probably nothing like the video released by the Princess of Wales to mark her emergence from treatment.
For wandering through wheat fields I would substitute tackling an overgrown garden that I had not had the energy to do anything with for more than a year – before having to have a sit down because I was so knackered. For a contemplative lean against a tree I would substitute a rest against a lamp-post on the way to work for a quiet sob. For shiny hair and complexion I would substitute what one of my doctors described as “a sort of greyness” that seems to linger on patients for a while after chemo.
Of course, Catherine wasn’t going to release a film showing her sobbing on a beach as she wondered if her cancer would come back and why she wasn’t now enjoying every single moment of her precious post-cancer life (as I did last summer).
Her keenness to return to work wasn’t ever going to be publicly followed by her describing her fears that she had forgotten how to do it or might not manage a whole day without needing a rest or a cry or both (I mentioned this often to people).
And she was hardly going to appear in her pyjamas wondering why she sometimes still struggled to get out of bed even though the treatment was done. Hers was the version you would post on Facebook with the grotty bits cropped out. But despite knowing that, I still found watching such glossy images of cancer’s aftermath quite jarring.
When the princess first announced she had cancer, in a video in March, I was very moved. As someone who had been diagnosed with breast cancer two years earlier and was just finishing treatment, I related to her shock and her fears for the future. I hoped she would have a successful course of treatment.
And I am really pleased she has made a recovery. But I found this new film upsetting in a different way. Her message of hope is lovely, but the soft-focus image of life on the other side of a course of chemo – despite the words that go with it – underplays the strain on patients and their families. The words cancer and chemotherapy cover a whole range of things, but if you have never encountered either close up then please know that it doesn’t always look like this.
Yes, there will be other people who have gone through it and come out the other side looking the same, but for many there are mental and physical scars that may never heal. Obviously no one looks at the royal family for reality, but it feels we are being talked to as if we can relate to what Catherine has been through.
While some of the sentiments rang a bell for me, the whole package was so far from relatable I wished I hadn’t watched it. I feel glad I didn’t see it as soon as I’d finished my chemo, when I was definitely grey and had a lot more anxiety than I do now about how to enter the world again.
Hopefully, there were other people watching who took more comfort from it than I did. And, of course, it’s her recovery to celebrate and communicate as she wants – I really hope it was her choice how it was done. But to anyone out there who worries that they can’t relate: please be assured that other cancer sufferers may have made quite a different film.
In my version there would have been happiness and love, but with an undercurrent of fear. I’ve written before about how cancer made me quite horrible at times and tested those closest to me, and my film definitely would have included arguments about the dishwasher.
The type of chemo I had meant that I was contending with a lot of hair loss, so there would also have been hairstyles that dealt with a combination of stubble and normal hair. There would have been a bit more anger, and some confusion about what I could take away from the whole experience. And as for the sepia tinge. Well, that may well have clashed with my grey pallor, so mine would have definitely been shot without filters.
Hilary Osborne is the Guardian’s money and consumer editor
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