Cancer: the ‘take no prisoners’ approach

Some of the people I interviewed for Positive were grimly, passionately determined not to let cancer get the better of them, and it was that “take no prisoners” attitude I wanted to capture. I never wanted the book to be a sentimental sermon about looking on the bright side. Bernadette Vella was fourteen weeks pregnant with her second child when she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s lymphoma. If anyone needed to be relentlessly stubborn in fighting disease, it was her.

“I don’t like to lose – it is not something I do often. The cancer could control my body and I had no choice about that, but it could not control my mind and spirit. I had a lot of anger (apparently that’s a normal reaction to cancer) and I directed all of my anger and negative thoughts at beating the cancer. Physically I could only fight it as much as my weakened body would allow. But mentally it surely picked the wrong person to fight with. If I was going to die, then I was going to go down fighting.

“There were definitely moments of feeling sad and sorry for myself, but they were truly few and far between. I always felt that if I felt down then the cancer was getting into my emotions, and it was an unwelcome visitor there … I also felt like I was not just doing it for myself and my family, but I was doing it for all the other women out there who get diagnosed with cancer while they are pregnant. I knew that if I could survive and carry my daughter to as close to term as possible, and if she came out with no complications, then I could give others hope that a cancer diagnosis while pregnant doesn’t mean the end of life for either the mother or the child.

Bernadette Vella (from Sally Collings, Positive, published by HarperCollinsPublishers Australia in 2009)