Today exactly I turn 32! When I was 15 I always thought that by 30 I’d have it all sorted. I’d be well-established in my dream career, holiday three times a year, the gorgeous house, the perfect husband and the one kid with the other on their way. Yeah… not so much.

But it’s funny I am so content with my life, I am really am. In reality my life is so much richer and surprising that I ever imagined. I’ve been thinking a lot about where I’ve come from and where I’d like to go and here are 32 hard-won lessons I learnt over the last 32 years I’d tell my younger self. My own personal ‘Everybodies free to wear sunscreen.’

1. It’s OK to change your mind. Many times. You will keep yourself stuck for months and years by insisting you ‘shouldn’t’ feel this way. You go travelling by yourself at 20 and hate it. You ‘should’ love your job in publishing but you don’t. You ‘should’ have it all together by now. Like clockwork every seven years you upheave your life. But out of the wreckage new things grow.

2. Be vulnerable, but only with people who deserve it. Those parts of yourself which you are most ashamed of are where you connect with others. And that ‘me too’ feeling is better than any drug. Remember what Lester Bangs said: ‘The only true currency in this bankrupt world is what we share with someone else when we’re uncool.’

3. No one person can be everything to you. Not your mum (even if she is wonderful), or your husband or your best friends. Much as you hate to admit it, no woman is an island and you need people – lots of people. A friend who you can dance with at 2am, and a friend who likes jogging bottoms and trashy TV about drag queens and vampires as much as you do. A friend whose known you for so long they remember when you got your first bra, and a new friend who sees you just as you are now.

4. Try new things, challenge yourself and expand your horizons. You contain multitudes.

5. You like what you like. And it’s OK to enjoy reading more than listening to music, to find shopping boring but to love going to museums.

6. Expectations will bite you in the arse. That big night out you planned for three months will end with you crying in the loos. That quick drink after work with friends will turn into an epic night out. Make plans, make many plans but remember life is what happens when you make other plans. (Thanks Dan Savage)

7. Observe the campsite rule in all things. Leave people’s hearts, nature and the world in a better state than when you arrived. (Thanks Dan Savage)

8. Therapy is like a long trudge down into a deep canyon. You are terrified, you have no idea how deep this goes. You don’t know if you will ever emerge. All you can see is two or three feet in front of you but in the end that is all you need. It is the best thing you have ever done.

9. If someone tells you who they are, believe them

10. If you are ever confused: look at what people do, not what they say. Words are fucking cheap, actions cost. When you’re 18 you will fall for your best male friend. He’ll tell you he loves you. Hours before kissing every other girl in the club. For a month the dissonance between these two thoughts will tear you apart. Until one day you ignore the words and look at his actions. The hardest lessons are often the most valuable.

11. At 20 you look back at photos of yourself at 15 and think my thighs look normal. At 25 you look back at photos of yourself at 20 and think how great your body looks. At 30 you look back at yourself at 25 and think how pretty you were with happiness shining through every pore. You are not as ugly or as fat as think you are. And the trick to muster is to be able to look into the mirror and realise how gorgeous you really are.

12. Remember the lesson of Florence Foster Jenkins – ‘People may say I can’t sing but no one can say I didn’t sing.’ Do things not because you are good at them but for the sheer pleasure of experiencing them.

13. You will spend your adolescent and twenties tormented by the opinions of near strangers. One day you will go to a friends wedding. You will see people you haven’t seen since you were at school. And you will realise with the sense of something lifting that their opinions of you don’t matter. And you will dance like nobody is watching because who cares if they are.

14. Be kind. The things you will regret most are failures of kindness. Be kind, be kind, be kind.

15. Know the difference between being kind vs being polite. Kindness is calling people on their bullshit. Politeness is saying nothing because it’s not done. Fuck being polite.

16. Listen to your feelings. That feeling of envy you get when a colleague mentions she is studying counselling will lead you down a new career path. That anger you feel with an old friend is a sign your boundaries are being violated. The bubbles of happiness you get when he takes your hand tells you he is the one. That fear you felt is a gift and you need to use it.

17. Listen to your body. Three Dr’s will tell you that stabbing pain in your kidney is a muscular ache and not the cyst a dark passenger growing inside you. 5 years later two Dr’s will tell you to relax ignoring the hormone fluctuations which make carrying to term almost impossible. You know your body inside out, so trust what you feel and don’t give up.

18. Find some way of moving your body that you love and do it regularly. Yes, I know exercise sucks but there will be one form of exercise out there which will make you feel gloriously fully alive. When you swim you feel like you are flying through the water.

19. Choose experiences over things every time.

20. Run your own race. You are running your own race and all those other people they are running different races with different goals. Keep your eyes on your own track. Remember ‘the race is long, and in the end, it’s only with yourself.’

21. Treat the people you love better than strangers.

22. Let go of things. Forgive if you can not because they deserve it but because you don’t need to keep carrying this stuff around.

23. Embrace space. You enjoy being busy. You want to do all the things now. But allow yourself time to wander, to daydream, to relax. Magic happens if you give it space and time.

24. See as much of this world as you can and not just the furthest corners. Try to explore your home town as if you were a tourist.

25. Learn how to manage your anger. For years when people annoy you instead of a) saying something you will b) distance yourself until they stop. Learning how to be assertive and express your feelings is one of those skills to master sooner rather than later.

26. When you were in your teens, you will 80% responsible and 20% a hot mess. Looking back you will regret that the ratio wasn’t reversed. Be ridiculously irresponsible while you still can.

27. You don’t have to earn your place in this world. For years you will almost kill yourself trying to be enough. Then one day after a lot of effort you will realise you always where enough. Like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz the way home was inside you all along.

28. First impressions are often bullshit. The first time I met my husband I thought he was incredibly handsome in clean-cut old movie star kind of way. I was also certain he was gay. The first time I met my best friend I thought she was a bitch, sorry Ros. You will be wrong about lots of people so give people a chance.

29. Absinthe is always a bad idea.

30. You will make many mistakes. They are inevitable and unavoidable. Learn from them. Forgive yourself and move forward making newer mistakes.

31. Don’t settle.

32. This is your one true wild and wonderful life. This moment here: a woman on her birthday writing this blogpost is all there is. You only get one shot make it count my darling. Eat the peach that is life until the juices run down your chin.

Be careful what you wish for

Every year, the beginning of Wimbledon marks the start of summer for me. I love tennis and Wimbledon so much that every year I tease He Who Shall Not Be Named (HWSNBN) that I’ll take two precious weeks of holiday to enjoy the tennis. My wish was granted because this time last year I lay a hospital bed recovering from keyhole abdominal surgery.

That was the end, of six months of hospital visits, of consultants, of tests, of google searches, although I didn’t know it then. It was ironic because last was the year I got healthy. I started eating well and exercising regularly. I was the healthiest I’d been in years. But it was also the year I ended up in hospital. I don’t know when it all began. My consultant suggested I could have been born with the cyst nestling inside me, like a dark passenger. But I first became aware I was sick in February last year.

The first attack

I woke all alone in pain in the middle of a Tuesday night in February. (HWSNBN was having an minor procedure in London the next day so was staying with his parents.) I stumbled from bed and was sick. Again and again and again. Food poisoning, I thought, as I curled up on the bathroom floor.

Except as the night faded to the day I begun to worry. I felt like I was burning up and no matter what position I sat or lay I just couldn’t get comfortable. My right side hurt as if somebody was grinding their fist into the into my back. The muscles in my abdominals screamed every time I threw up. Peeing was frequent and painful.

I took a taxi and met my baby sister at the emergency GP’s clinic at the station. The unsympathetic Dr diagnosed me with Noro, the sickness virus, that had been doing the rounds. But I’d had kidney pains before and this felt suspiciously similar to the UTI’s (urinary tract infection) I’d had as a child. Finally after me being uncharacteristically pushy (the pain was making me be less British about everything) he relented and agreed to test me for UTI . We waited over an hour for the results (the Dr had gone home and forgotten to do the test). But when saw another Dr, she confirmed I had a UTI and prescribed some antibiotics.

With the help of my sister, god love her, I got home unscathed. Apart from an undignified bout of puking up the antibiotics outside the Co-op. That night I couldn’t sleep. I woke early opened the curtains and stared out at the people going to work counting down the hours until HWSNB came home. HSWNBN was the perfect nurse plying me with painkillers and cranberry juice. (I couldn’t stomach anything for almost two weeks except juice and a small portion of plain rice.)

A + E

By Thursday evening I was getting worse. I was still running a fever, having to pee every hour and even worse the pain in my kidneys had intensified. The attacks came in waves. Sometimes the pain receded and I could talk and even haul my sorry carcass to the toilet without help. But when the waves of pain washed over, I could do nothing but curl myself into a ball and retch. We waited for a break in the pain and then HWSNBN drove me to Worthing A + E, figuring it would be less full of fighting drunks then Brighton. I hobbled in, preparing myself for wait. They saw me almost immediately. ‘I can always tell the kidney infections,’ the lovely nurse said ‘from the way they’re bent over like they’re ancient.’ They took my blood, urine and x -rayed me. Finally a very tired Dr came to see me, there were no kidney stones. As far as they could tell it was ‘just’ a kidney infection (Ha). So I was sent home at 4am with heavy duty painkillers and told to keep taking my antibiotics.

By Saturday I was feeling even worse. I was still being sick and running a fever. I drowsed on off upright slumped over a pillow because I couldn’t bear to put any weight on my kidney. We went back to the clinic at the station and saw another third doctor who tested me and told me I didn’t have an UTI. Despite the fact that on two previous occasions days before tests had revealed I had. HSWNBN was furious, it was Saturday afternoon and all the doctors were closing. He knew I wouldn’t be able to wait until Monday. I was delirious by this point and had to be half carried to the car. He rung the locum who talked to me over the phone and prescribed different antibiotics. After a couple more uncomfortable days the antiobiotics kicked in. Two draining weeks off work I was able to go back. I was better.

GPs, more GPs and specialists

Less than a month later I started getting kidney pain again. More doctors visits, more antibiotics. By this point I have officially become the person nobody wanted to sit next to in the Dr’s surgery. Pale, sweating and vomiting, I looked hot 🙂

Another month passed, more kidney pains signalled another infection. My GP agreed it was time to see the kidney specialist. HWSNB had private medical insurance with work and had presciently put me on the policy. Surprisingly it was easy to get my medical records out of A + E, for the health insurance. But the medical surgery at the station had lost my records. Seriously Brightonians, don’t go there they are so awful.

After many, many phonecalls the insurer approved my claim. I had an appointment with a kidney specialist who examined me and recommended a CT scan. CT scanner are so expensive they travels from hospital to hospital in a big radiative truck. Taking my clothes off in a tiny, airline like bathroom I put on a hospital robe and lay down on the plank. The nurse hooked up a catheter in my hand and retreated behind  a shielded compartment. The CT scanner slid over me like a big donut as distant voices instructed me to breath in and out. Then they injected me with radiation. It  felt like hot lead sliding into my arm a warm feeling like slipping into a hot bath but my mouth tasted like copper and blood..

Afterwards the nurses who had been so friendly and chatty beforehand didn’t meet my eyes. ‘Did you see anything?’ I asked.

‘The doctor will give your results.’ she said.

A diagnosis finally

He didn’t.

When I rang to receive my results, the specialist’s PA told me them over the phone.

‘You have a cyst on your ovaries. Nothing to do with the kidneys after all. You’ll have to see the gynaecologist. An appointment has been made.’

Shocked and stunned I made a terrible mistake. I went back into work and googled cyst. The results flashed up: INFERTILITY. CANCER. DEATH. I had always thought I would have children, one day, in the far off distant future. It wasn’t until it seemed like the possibility was going to be taken from me that I felt how much I wanted them. I rang my dad in tears. ‘It will be OK,’ he kept saying. ‘At least they know now what it is.’ It had been over three months of pain and discomfort since the first episode.

The gynaecologist was lovely. He showed me the CT scans so I could see my insides, on odd experience. My bones (‘strong and healthy’), my kidneys one bigger than the other (‘perfectly normal’) and the cyst a dark mass above my womb. The cyst was very large 10 centimeters in total, swelling my right ovary to the size of a grapefruit. There was a very small chance that the cyst was cancerous but he was pretty certain I had a dermoid cyst, which can contain teeth or hair. (If you’re eating I’d strongly suggest you do not google dermoid cyst) Yep, inside my body was a full on horror show.

When he examined me, I realised I could feel the cyst a hard mass on my right side. The cyst was twisting my fallopian tubes explaining the stabbing pain I felt and pressing on my bladder causing my recurrent UTIs. If the cyst burst it would cause sepsis that could be life threatening. I needed an operation to remove it as soon as possible, was I free for next Monday? He try to remove the cyst using keyhole surgery the cyst’s size and where it was placed in the body, he wasn’t hopeful. I tried to fight back tears. My mum had major abdominal surgery and I knew what that meant. If I was lucky abdominal surgery would mean weeks in hospital, a month of work, months unable to drive. If I was lucky.

That weekend I was due to attend a *ahem* fairy festival with my two of my best friends. But I was in near constant pain at this point and peeing like a pregnant lady so camping + Portaloos didn’t seem like the best idea. I thought about it and if I was going to bedridden for a month, that my last weekend was going to be a weekend to remember. It was the best decision I made. Time with my best friends watching them objectify the St John’s Ambulance men was the panacea I needed. I confided how utterly terrified I was of the operation and of something going wrong. One morning I woke early and sat by the lake. I watched the sun play over the water and saw the otters frolicking. It sounds ridiculous but I just knew in that moment that I would be OK.

My operation

It was one of the hottest days of the year and had been nil my mouth since 8pm the night before. As we arrived at the hospital at 7.30am my mouth was as dry as a dessert. We’d been told that the list would be arranged on the day so I might have a long wait. I didn’t even unpack my bag before the consultant came. I signed forms, changed into my gown and plastic knickers and was wheeled away. Seeing HWSNB retreat into the distance as I lay flat already like a patient was terrifying. There was the usual struggle as the nurse and anaesthetist tried to put a cathether in my hand. I have what is known in the trade as bad veins. ‘It’s a good thing you’re not a heroin addict’ the nurse said after they had finally got the needle in.

‘Yes, real good thing.’

The anaesthetist injected morphine and the room whirled around me. Like a fan rotating overhead. As they injected the anaesthetic I prepared myself for the countdown. But if by the time they got to 3, I was gone.

Six hours later…

Coming to was like fighting your way up from the deeps. Voice talked at me but all I wanted to do was sleep. When I finally opened by eyes I had an oxygen mask over my face and two nurses surrounding me. I was in recovery. Through blurred vision I could see the clock on the wall it said 12.30pm but that couldn’t be. The operation was only supposed to take two hours. Everything hurt, I couldn’t tell what type of operation I’d had.

Me: *slurring through the mask*Kaowl?

Nurse: What’s that dear?

Me: Keowl?

Nurse: Keyhole?

Me: *nods*

Nurse: Yes, it was keyhole.

Me: Yay.

I can’t possibly put into words the sense of relief I felt on hearing I’d had keyhole surgery. It felt, it still feels, like a miracle.

The women in the next bed was swearing up a storm and struggling against the nurses.

Me: *whispered* Y is she shouting

Nurse: it’s the anaesthetic is takes some people like that.

Me: I was like that?

Nurse: Oh no, you have been very good.

Me: Yay!

When my blood oxygen levels were better I was wheeled back to the ward. I called HWSNBN and my family. I thought I sounded perfectly normal. Apparently I was speaking very slowly, like someone caught in a time warp. I figured out how to turn on the TV which felt like a triumph. Federer was losing in the first round of Wimbledon, but that may have been the morphine.

The morphine started to wear off just as I had visitors and the vomiting started. Let me tell you being sick after abdominal surgery no fun whatsoever. Who knew? Unable to keep even water down they injected me with anti sickness drugs. HSWNBN had ordered me lunch: cheese souffle and chocolate cheesecake. But all I could manage when I was finally hungry at 8pm that evening was jelly and dry toast.

The consultant was really pleased with how the operation had gone. He had removed part of my right ovary with the cyst and he showed me the pictures. My distended ovary, the kinked fallopian tube as I tried not to gag. The cyst was being sent off to be biopsied and check it wasn’t cancerous. I was just meant to be a day patient but they kept me in overnight to check my progress. I was sent home the next day.

My recovery

There were stumbling blocks along the way. The next day my whole body ached as the carbon dioxide they pumped my stomach to keep my organs separate during the operation began to leave my body. It was like my lungs were cramping. I lay flat and like a beetle flailed on my back unable to use my muscles to pull myself up until I was to helped up by HWSNBN.

For those who don’t know in keyhole surgery they make three small incisions: two low down on either side of your pelvis and a main incision in the belly button through which they took out the cyst. When I finally took my bandages off, HWSNBN and I looked at my non-existent belly button in horror. Then with a pop it opened. The glue from the bandages has stuck it together.

It was slow going getting better. My incisions were infected and my belly button: black, blue and green looked zombified. I’ve had ongoing knee, hip and foot problems all down my right side that the physio and osteopath think was caused by scarring

But despite all that, I feel lucky: that I haven’t gone back to hospital, that the cyst wasn’t cancerous, that this year I don’t have two weeks recovering from my operation and watching Wimbledon. Well, maybe I’m a little bit torn about that last one 🙂 But one year on, I’m still so lucky.