A moment that changed me: my son was relishing life after recovering from cancer – so why did I feel broken?

It is not for me to describe in detail what happened to my teenage son. Suffice it to say that in 2021 he was diagnosed with osteosarcoma, had a 12.5 hour operation on his 14th birthday to remove half of his upper jaw, then underwent eight months of intensive chemotherapy. For most of the year, he spent more time in the hospital than outside. If he wasn't monitored for chemotherapy drugs, he was treated for their side effects: nausea, fainting, headaches, nosebleeds that wouldn't stop. "We don't give this chemo class to adults," the oncologist said. To my raised eyebrows, she replied, "They couldn't take it."

Covid meant that only her father and I were allowed, one at a time, in the cancer service. It was a surreal world of blue curtains, masked nurses, and endlessly beeping machines. During my 10-hour shifts, I tried to encourage uplifting activities like practicing French or reading, but most of the time my son and I were sleeping or watching shitty TV. The hospital didn't have internet, so we overdosed on episodes of Dinner Date, Taskmaster, and reality TV shows. When my son was doing well enough, we laughed at it all, pretending to ignore the big bags of neon yellow chemo-poison that were flowing down the tube from his chest. I tried to keep his (and mine) spirits up by planning what we would do after his treatment was over – horseback riding in Iceland, a concert at Wembley. Each week, we counted the chemotherapy remaining: "18 more weeks"; "We are halfway there"; "We're done with doxorubicin and cisplatin, now it's just methotrexate to go." When things went wrong, I promised her, “One day it will be over. Life will return to normal. »

Then the treatment ended and after MRIs, CT scans and blood tests my son was declared cured. In the weeks that followed, I watched with joy as his hair, eyelashes and eyebrows grew back and he stopped looking like a sickly medieval Madonna. I spent my savings on the now legendary trip to Iceland and the clean air, horseback riding and long hikes brought it back to life. His father took him caving in the Wye Valley. He went to his first gig at Wembley. In September he was able to walk to school for the first time in a year, his blue rucksack crammed with GCSE books. He played online with his friends, improvised jazz on the piano and, to everyone's delight, won a cross-country race at school. By all accounts, his life had resumed.

I was amazed and grateful. We were the lucky ones.

Then the second wave of grief hit. I'm hanging around, unable to fulfill my daily goals as a freelance writer. My to-do lists, when I started doing them, ended up on the couch.

"You should be happy, you idiot", I kept telling me. But I couldn't stop thinking about the future my son had lost. The future in which he had never had reason to question his own physical perfection, where he hadn't missed an entire year of friendship building, where he bore no physical or mental scars. I had a hard time coming to terms with the fact that, unlike his classmates, his new future would involve reconstructive surgery, a life of intermittent testing, the specter of late side effects from chemotherapy. It doesn't matter that he himself is busy enjoying life - the wonder of Pumpkin Spice Frappuccinos, the joy of playing Brahms, afternoon tea with his beloved grandfather. Never mind that the only time he looked even vaguely depressed was when I was preaching about the health benefits of flax seeds and shiitake mushrooms, or asking him about his group of friends. I was paralyzed with fear that his trying year and its aftermath would set him too far apart from his peers, that he would find it impossible to thrive.

A series of chance conversations over the course of a week changed my gloomy outlook. I learned that a friend's child had been afflicted with a terrible bladder disorder that the doctors could not explain. The next day, a breast surgeon told me about the women she sees with extra nipples, or third breasts that emerge in adolescence near their armpits. "These things are remarkably common," she said brightly. Later that same day, someone described to me his teenage daughter's ongoing struggles with autism. Another friend shared how a parent whose mother is in jail for drug-related offenses was unfairly typecast at school.

I'm not happy that these things happen. But the stories about the different challenges that young people can face reminded me that something going wrong a little – or a lot – in adolescence is not an experience reserved for a tiny minority. Out of curiosity, I searched for statistics on Google. About 1% suffer from epilepsy, 2-5% have some form of facial disfigurement, 2-3% have scoliosis,...