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My thyroid cancer arrived by accident, in the way life-changing things sometimes do. In May of this year, I went for an upright MRI for a minor injury on my arm, and the scan happened to catch the mass in my neck. By the following month, I had a diagnosis. People kept telling me it was “the good cancer”, the kind that can be taken out neatly and has a high survival rate. But I’m 54, and my dad died of cancer in his 50s, so that shadow came down on me hard.
My eldest son was doing A-levels at the time, so we didn’t tell him at first. I felt as if I’d stepped across some irreversible Rubicon that you hear about happening to other people, but never imagine will actually come for you.
After my diagnosis, I retreated. I barely left the house. My neck was bruised and swollen, as if I’d attempted some sort of gruesome Halloween makeup. I felt peeled-open and humiliated, as though strangers could look straight through my skin. Friends and family stepped up: my brother, who lives hours away, and I had this incredible chat for hours on a park bench in the sunshine. Still, I curled inward.
It wasn’t until later that summer that my mum managed to coax me out for lunch and a trip to the Whitworth Art Gallery, in Manchester near where I live. There was a JMW Turner exhibition on. I knew his name and his work in the way most people do: big ships, sweeping seascapes of blues and golds. The grand stuff of someone else’s life. I didn’t want culture or fresh air or anything that required being seen, but I agreed to go to please her.
The exhibition rooms were dark and quiet, lined with sepia prints. My mum moved from caption to caption, reading each one carefully. I drifted behind her, barely looking. When you’re waiting for more test results, for the next consultant meeting, for someone to tell you whether cancer has threaded itself further into your body, nothing penetrates.
I was about to sneak off to the cafe when one painting stopped me in my tracks. The print was Mount St Gothard, from 1808. In it, a pack horse stands on a mountain path, exhausted and pausing to catch its breath, with its head hanging low to the ground. The cargo on its back looks impossible. It was like looking in a mirror.
It felt absurd, recognising myself in a horse on a Swiss mountain painted more than 200 years ago. But there I was. The horse was me. The overburdened body. The sense of not knowing how much more of the journey there was to go. For the first time in weeks, something cut through the fog. My feelings – the ones I’d been hiding, managing, downplaying so I didn’t worry everyone else – had shape.
It was a moment of recognition. I had been managing everyone’s expectations around my illness, and seeing the horse gave me permission to let some support in. Yes, being able to sit in misery, darkness and fear was a necessary part of the process for me, but it couldn’t be done for ever.
There’s now a 10-mile tunnel through the mountain in the painting: it takes 14 minutes by car. The horse must have taken hours.
Months later, with two surgeries to fully remove my thyroid completed, and radioactive iodine treatment ahead of me marking my final medical hurdle, I’m finally starting to feel more like myself. I’m back at work, and I’m even ready to pick up the creative bits of life I’d dropped: the DIY; the craft-making; the messier, more joyful things that make me feel alive.
It wasn’t the diagnosis, or the operations, or even the relief of curability of my cancer that marked a turning point. It was Turner’s horse. He made it to the top of the mountain carrying all that baggage, and was going to go back down the other side and have that pack taken off. And so will I. Caroline Howarth
