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Maddy Hadwin Donnelly

Maddy gained a first-class degree in English Literature with Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia in July 2022, before moving to London the following September to begin this MA. She is using this time to engage in life writing – which will hopefully culminate in a novel-length work – surrounding her experience of having had a childhood brain tumour, surgery, and chemotherapy, as well as exploring how these events have had an impact on her life post-treatment. 

Email: maddyhadwin@yahoo.com


Breakups

Winter 2021:

Naadim’s flatmate, Lily, is being thrown a surprise birthday party. I’m in London to spend time with Naadim, so I’m attending. His other flatmates take Lily out for cocktails so we can put up balloons. Lily’s friends arrive in small groups, and I introduce myself, ‘Hi, I’m Maddy, I’m Naadim’s girlfriend.’ I’ve not been his girlfriend for very long, so to call myself this still carries a thrill. 

To stage the surprise, Lily’s friends crouch behind the big sofa that separates the lounge and dining area, and Naadim and I snuggle up on the sofa. 

A few minutes later, Lily comes into the room, clearly a little confused at the balloons dotted around the walls, and Naadim calls to her, ‘Hey, we’re just watching The Nut Job.’ 

This is the cue, and her friends all jump up and yell, ‘Surprise!’. Lily shrieks with pleasure. 

The party gets underway. I drink steadily, laughing with Naadim’s flatmates and Lily’s friends. Alcohol has made me an extrovert. Everyone seems to be having a good time. 

Just before midnight, it’s time to head to a nightclub in Shoreditch. I can’t walk straight at the best of times; now, clutching Naadim’s hand, I stumble down the street, veering from one side to the other. 

In the queue for the nightclub, Lily, Naadim’s other flatmates, Gethin and Ben, as well as Lily’s other friends, get let through by security. Naadim does too, but he hangs back to wait for me. 

The security guard asks me how much I’ve drunk. 

‘Not much,’ I say, fudging the truth a little. 

He looks tired and unconvinced. 

Naadim comes forward, ‘Mate, she’s got a disability.’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I’ve got mild ataxia because of a childhood brain tumour.’ It feels as though, surrounded by drunk clubbers and freezing in the December night air, my boyfriend and I have wound stethoscopes around our necks and are pushing square glasses up the brinks of our noses. Naadim’s a medical student, after all, and I had cancer, so in this instance we’re a qualified team. I add, ‘It affects my left side. It makes me unsteady, and it makes me shake. I can’t help it.’ 

‘Come on, mate,’ Naadim urges. 

After a moment, I am begrudgingly let through. Naadim and I laugh as we head to the bar to join the others. I feel gleeful to have used my diagnosis in this way. Though everything I said was true, I’m so used to making excuses to hide my illness, that drawing on it to get me into a club makes me feel like a liar. Surely, I’m allowed to use the cancer card? During my second year of uni, I heard that this girl we knew shaved her head and used to tell people she was on chemo to skip queues and get free stuff. I’m not like that. 

On reaching his friends, Naadim says, ‘Guess what happened.’ 

When I matched with him on a dating app in the summer, I was so open about my diagnosis that he seems to think I’m open with the whole world. It’s clear he sees no reason I should be embarrassed, and I love this about him. 

Together, we tell his friends about what happened, smiling, often speaking over one another. His friends grin one second and frown the next, like they don’t know whether they should laugh or feel sorry for me. 

‘It’s okay,’ I say, ‘It was a long time ago, you can laugh.’ Feeling very drunk and high on life, I laugh to prove I’m in earnest. Naadim nods along fervently, his hand on my back. Ben lets out an uncertain chuckle like he can’t believe how flippant I’m being. I can’t quite believe it either. 

Spring 2022:

As we lie together on his bed, Naadim’s kisses move from my toes, up my legs, going between one and the other, until he reaches my left thigh, then he bites down softly. Because of my ataxia, every sensation on my left side is heightened and at the same time strangely distant, like feeling the tug of a balloon far away at the end of the string as it’s gripped in a violent wind. I gasp involuntarily and he looks up at me, his eyes asking, Are you okay? Shall I keep going? I nod, reach out and run my fingers through his soft black hair. His eyes break from mine and he nibbles at my thigh, and I feel my left leg begin to shake. For fuck’s sake, I think, not now. Give me a minute at least. I can’t distract myself from it, the shaking gets worse until my leg is jolting like an enormous fleshy vibrator at its highest setting.  

‘Sorry,’ I say, ‘It’ll stop at some point.’ I smile, embarrassed.

‘No,’ he says, ‘don’t worry.’ He runs a palm across my shaking leg. ‘It wasn’t good?’  

‘No, it was – so good. I can’t control it.’ 

‘I know.’ He moves up the bed and kisses me, then sits back again. Once more, he tells me, ‘Don’t worry.’ I move my legs so my feet are flat against the mattress, and hold the left one as still as I can with my hands. Slowly, the shaking dies down. His hands push my thighs apart, together, apart. ‘Wow,’ he says, still moving my thighs around, looking at me naked on the bed, ‘wow.’  

I grin at how he tells me I’m beautiful. 

When I’m still once more, Naadim fits on a condom, slips a pillow under the base of my back. I lift one leg so it’s resting on his shoulder, he holds the other and sucks on my toes. My leg threatens to shake once more but then he’s inside me and I’m distracted. His eyes are full of dark lightning as I move with him, and we breathe heavily in tandem. 

Mid-Summer 2022:  

I’m in Norwich, having just completed my third year at the University of East Anglia. Naadim calls and says his dad has seen a picture of the two of us on his bedroom wall, found a used condom in his bin. He says if he stays with me his mum would never speak to him again. I’m sobbing, sitting on the edge of my bed and seeing all the photographs of me and Naadim I blu-tacked to my bedroom door. Through the phone, I can hear Naadim crying too. I can tell he’s about to break up with me, so I say, ‘I don’t want to do this over the phone’, when what I mean is, ‘I don’t want you to leave me, not on the phone, not ever.’

He says, ‘No, I don’t want to, either.’

 

That night, I go to my sister’s house an hour away. She hugs me as I cry, first in the car and then on her sofa, again and again that evening. 

The next day, Naadim comes to Cambridge. We pick him up from the station. In the car, I sit in the front seat next to my sister, with him in the back, but soon I think how ridiculous this is, and when the car slows at a red light, I climb through the middle to sit beside him. 

What follows is the last night Naadim and I hold one another. We spend the next day together in Cambridge. The sun is bright, we buy ice creams and eat them sitting on the wall opposite King’s College. In the late afternoon, we lie together on the grass near the river, he falls asleep, I want time to press us together and never let us leave. At the station we kiss, our faces are close together when he whispers, ‘This isn’t goodbye.’ 

I murmur back, ‘It better not be.’

I’m crying again and he says I’m going to make him cry. 

 

There’s a month of will he stay? I can’t stand the uncertainty, so I ask Naadim to make a decision, one way or the other. A mug he bought me for my twenty-first birthday, which says, ‘To Tea or Not to Tea?’, breaks at the handle. I fix it imperfectly with superglue and text Naadim, saying, I’m like Bob the Builder

He answers, Better than Bob the Builder xx

The mug breaking, me attempting to set it to rights, feels like a sign from the God that Naadim believes in, and I don’t.

 

Naadim ends our relationship whilst on facetime from his summer volunteering placement in South America. I saw him one more time before he left, and that visit was so emotionally jarring I almost wish he hadn’t come. He only stayed for an hour, we talked, cried, had sex, he left. 

 

Two days later, I’m at the doctors. I’ve felt nauseous for over a week now; I took a pregnancy test, and it came back negative. 

The GP looks young, perhaps only a few years older than I am. I wonder if her lack of experience matters less to me than the fact that she might understand me a little better than some of her male, middle-aged colleagues would. She’s beautiful. I hold my lungs stiff as I breathe in, trying to see if she has the potential to make me nervous. When I’m anxious, they jitter, but these days they feel like dead things. During the exam, the GP presses her hands against my stomach. Her palms are warm, her touch gentle, almost coaxing. I feel as though my stomach should grow to fill her hands. I’m aware that, since Naadim left me, the GP will be the last person to touch me in such a way for months, maybe years. I crave physical contact, and yet most of the time I’ll only let a lover touch and hold me in the most innocent ways I want to be touched and held. As the doctor’s fingers leave each newly touched spot behind, I know that I’m going to be so lonely from now on, and my skin is going to ache from lack of fingerprints. Naadim’s fingerprints. I want all of him. How much I miss him scares me because the missing might not ever go away. Emotions, unlike people, don’t run away to protect themselves. If they did, maybe I wouldn’t cry so much all the time.  

The GP asks me to wee into a small bottle. I go to a toilet, come back and give it to her, thinking about how warm it is. She goes over to a counter and sticks a strip of paper into my sample.  

Sitting back down a minute or so later, her at her desk, me on a chair next to it, she tells me, ‘I don’t think you’re pregnant.’ 

I try to work out how I feel about this. I almost had an anxiety attack yesterday thinking I might be, but it all comes back to him in the end. Whether, if I had been pregnant, Naadim might have stayed, whether I would have let him. I suppose I would have, because of my grief at him going. Of course, there was the most likely scenario where I would have kept the baby and it wouldn’t have made any difference. Male Muslims can marry women of monotheistic faiths, according to the Qur’an. But I’m not even christened. Not that Naadim wanted to marry me, he made that clear, however much he said he loved me. I didn’t want to marry him, not really, not then, but I wanted a few years for us, at the end of which we would choose each other.  

‘We’ll send your urine sample off to be tested, and I’ll put you on some antibiotics just in case, though I don’t think it’s a UTI. But because you mentioned your tumour -’ the GP pauses, studying her computer screen, ‘the incompletely removed astrocytoma – I’ll book you in for an MRI scan just to be safe.’   

I say, ‘Thank you’, and think, if I’m dying, Naadim might spend some time with me before I go. He’d be relieved to, he loves me, he wouldn’t have to tell his parents, it would just be me and him. I long for this, and then feel guilty because of everything everybody did when I was younger to keep me alive.

 

Sitting up in bed the night after I’d been to visit the GP, one hand holding my knees to my chest and the other scrolling through my phone, I reread the last messages Naadim sent me, and zero in on the parts that make the pain worse. He’s still figuring out his identity, he’s afraid to let go of me forever, he’ll miss me a lot, a hell of a lot, all he ever wants is for me to be okay, goodbye x. In one of his messages, he said that during our relationship I made him feel like a different person and opened his eyes as to what it means to be happy with someone. Half of me is pleased to have been that person, the other half feels sick at how this wasn’t enough for him to stay. Even if he regrets leaving me, I don’t think he’ll come back. To be told by the man you love that God sends rewards and challenges, and you might be the latter, and to leave you might be a chance at redemption, staying with you keeping him from Heaven when he dies, is made all the worse by the fact that I’d offered to change for him, to raise our kids – if and when we had them – as Muslim, even to study the Qur’an to see if I could nudge my current tendencies towards atheism into a belief in the almighty. Closing my eyes, feeling tears drip from below my eyelids and onto my cheeks, I can’t bear what’s in my head, my chest, a kind of aching flood. Something has to give way. I’m desperate, I’m drowning. 

 

Autumn 2022:

My MRI scan comes back reporting no growth in what is left of my tumour after the surgery and chemotherapy that took place during my childhood. 

Some days I still cry, but I’m crying for Naadim less and less.

I have to keep moving forward. 

 

I wonder how I could have convinced myself for the second time that I was either pregnant or dying. The same thing happened in the spring of 2021 after I broke up with my first boyfriend and my period was late and I had a stabbing pain behind my left eye. I suppose that when you’re suddenly removed from somebody in such a way, you can’t picture a normal life without them anymore, and extremes are what makes sense because what’s happened already carries a sense of extremity. I assume I wanted the babies because I wanted someone who was all mine to love and live for, and as a reason to keep the babies’ fathers in my life, the first so I didn’t have to leave the cheating liar, and the second so I might see Naadim every now and then, even if he decided not to be with me. 

 

The experiences I went through as a child are half-gone from my memory, and I’m practically numb to the emotional charge of the parts I do remember, having considered them so many times. I wanted to be dying because if I was dying then nobody could tell me the first time that I couldn’t have the cheating bastard by my side as I died, and the second time I felt that Naadim would willingly love me for a little longer until I was gone forever. Part of me knew it was delusional to think that if I was going to die of a brain tumour I would remain entirely myself until it happened, but I had a need to infuse it all with romance. 

 

Because I have a tiny chunk of the tumour still left in my head, it always feels like I’m further than everyone else on the path to death. Often, it seems as though something will tip the balance and it’ll start to grow again, even though the doctors have told me that there is as much likelihood of this happening as there is of someone currently cancer-free getting a tumour. Even now, part of me believes that, if I wish it enough, I can tip the balance. 

 

It felt natural to believe that I was dying, because in my grief for Naadim I forgot the parts of me that could exist without him loving them, and I wanted to die in the way an adult who somehow survived being a child with cancer thinks they’re bound to go, in the end. 

 

Counselling

On a Saturday in mid-January 2023, my parents drive me from Liverpool to my eldest sister’s flat in North London. We have lunch with her and her partner, then my parents leave, and my sister drives me to Brockley, South London. Coming back, after being at home for a month, is freeing. At home, I feel full; here I’m empty, but in a way that lets me breathe. Here, I can dance around my room in a manic way, waving my arms and pretending I’m screaming into the mirror. I never knew I had it in me to dance like that.

Three days after my arrival, I have my fifth uni counselling session. It’s one of the things I looked forward to the most after the New Year.

 

Saying ‘I’m doing okay’ isn’t the same as saying ‘I’m okay.’ 

‘I used to cry a lot,’ I tell the counsellor. ‘Then, when I was ten, I decided enough was enough and I was being ridiculous.’ He smiles at that, making me smile, too. I suppose it is a bit comical, a child making such a decision. I add, ‘I didn’t really cry for a long time after that, and I thought it was brilliant. Now, I cry all the time.’ 

My MA has made me into a person who can quote The Guardian, research papers and novels, in counselling, and relate them to my own experience. Sometimes I’m mid-sentence and take a detour to recommend a series or a novel to the counsellor. Occasionally he asks me the names of these again at the end of the session. I hope he watches them or reads them, as it would mean I’d have been able to give something to him in return for all the time he’s spent on me. I also refer to my writing, or things I have imagined writing or plan to write, to create a picture of my psyche. I’ve never felt so much like an artist, and he notices how much I rely on written expression. When he comments on this, I feel like it’s truer than it was before. In counselling, I untangle problems that turn into confessions. 

I tell the counsellor, ‘What I had was an astrocytoma. A benign brain tumour. So, it wasn’t cancerous. Socially, we call it cancer, I call it cancer, but I’m not sure if it actually counts. Scientifically. It could, my ex was a medical student, he said it did.’ I wait for him to speak, then he doesn’t, so I say, ‘But I was on the children’s cancer ward, I went on cancer trust trips, I’ve attended cancer support groups…’ 

‘Exactly,’ he says, ‘you aren’t going to sit a tiny child down and say that technically…’ We laugh together. He says, ‘So for you, this is the experience you’ve had, this is what’s shaped you.’ 

‘Yeah.’ I pause. ‘My mum tells me about my aunt’s ex-husband, he was somehow involved in raising money for the Make a Wish Foundation, and when I got a wish, Mum says he sort of implied I wasn’t ill enough to get one.’

I don’t look at the counsellor. It’s hard to look, he’s so kind, but I can see the lines of his figure in the armchair opposite. ‘I might have died,’ I say. ‘We didn’t know.’ This feels like I’m trying to justify something, and I’m sure he understands. 

He nods. ‘Exactly.’ 

‘And a few years ago, one of my friends from uni asked if Make a Wish felt pretty stupid when I didn’t die, and I was at a bit of a loss and kind of had to say that they don’t only give wishes to kids who are definitely going to die. She was lovely though, the friend. She didn’t mean it in a bad way. It’s just that there have been a few times where people, whether it was their intention or not, have made me feel like I wasn’t ill enough. And I wonder if I wasn’t…’ 

He thinks for a moment then asks, ‘ill enough for who?’ 

‘I don’t know.’ We share a smile. I’ve always found it easy to smile when I’ve just been crying. I admit, ‘I’m just so scared… I don’t want to be a fraud. I don’t want to be a fake.’ I tell him about James Frey and his book A Million Little Pieces that I studied for my essay on ethics in life writing, how Frey fictionalized his past and shaped loads of people’s thoughts on addiction. I say, ‘I’m worried about saying I’m an authority on something, and then people saying this about me, and me hurting people because it’s almost like I pretended. I’m worried that things weren’t as bad as I’m making them out to be.’ I don’t just mean the cancer, though that’s a huge part of it, probably the reason for a lot of it. ‘My parents say things like, ‘you were a happy child’, and I was, but also, I wasn’t. And I doubt myself so much that I doubt all the experiences I had that I kept inside and didn’t tell anyone about…’, like bad intrusive thoughts that scared me to the point where I thought I was going mad, feelings of intense derealisation, loneliness, dejection. 

The counsellor says, ‘This isn’t something nice, so why would you make it up?’

Tears run down my cheeks. 

He asks, ‘Do you think you’re a fake?’

‘I don’t think so.’

 He nods. ‘I don’t think so either.’ 

I cry during every counselling session, but now my crying is more like sobbing. I can only look at the counsellor once I’ve let myself sob a little. Eventually, I say, ‘I could talk about all of this with my family. Recently, I’ve tried to be more open, and it’s been good… really good for me. But, sometimes they’ll tell me I shouldn’t feel a certain way, and I know they’re right, but I can’t help how some thoughts just stick. And I learnt when I was at school that keeping some things to yourself is safer, less embarrassing. So, there are just some things I don’t really talk about, that I’ve never really…’ I draw my jacket tighter around my chest. I think maybe, through my writing, I’ll eventually say it all, so that my family will say something back, but I think even then they still won’t say what I need them to say, or maybe the wanting will be so engraved in me that even if they say it, I won’t hear it.

I’m tired of carrying all this inside me. 

I rarely feel relaxed. 

 

We’re nearing the end of our allocated six sessions, and he says they might be able to sort out some more for me if I need them. And he looks at me and I say, ‘I’d be okay. I’d manage.’ I always manage. The room where I’ve relieved myself of so many of my before unspoken fears hangs between us. I tear up again. 

He says, ‘There’s a ‘but’ there.’ 

I feel the same way as I did in late 2021, when a friend from uni looked at me after I’d had a kind of breakdown and said, ‘Oh, Maddy,’ because we both knew I couldn’t get out what was hurting me. I was so used to keeping things to myself that when I finally tried to bring someone else into my hurt, I felt like someone who’d landed in another country and wanted to converse in a language they didn’t know how to speak. The urge to talk was there, but that wasn’t enough. 

To the counsellor I say, ‘I… I just… I don’t…’ 

God. How to say what’s inside of me? How to get it all out? 

He suggests I do some writing to process what we went through today, and when I come back for our last session, I can say whether I’d like him to sort out more follow-up sessions for me. 

I say, ‘I don’t want to take time away from anybody else if you’re really busy.’ But, inside, I want more time. I hold in so much, and never before have I let all of it exist outside of me like this.

He says, ‘You shouldn’t worry about that, just focus on what you need. We want to give you the support that you need.’ 

He’s so kind. 

What I need and what I want are two different things. I can make it, get up, enjoy life in my own way, go back to bed and do it all again the next day and the next. I have family and friends I can call if I need to. I can compress, repress, and I can manage, if needed. I’ve been doing it for quite a while.