'I've written the cancer story I desperately wanted to read' - Mum of two documents family life through husband's two testicular tumours

But Laura’s mind was racing. She felt frantic, worried, useless, as she sat on high alert listening to every sound her husband James was making. He lay asleep behind the door, after almost 72 hours of intense chemotherapy. They desperately hoped it would rid him of the testicular cancer that had grown inside his body for a second time.

“I had been taking his temperature and every time I did, it was a little bit higher and a little bit higher,” Laura recalls. “And he was really not himself. Well, he’d just had all those drugs pumped into his system. I sat outside the bedroom door listening to him snoring, making sure he was still alive.”

She remembers not just the date, but the time - 8pm on Saturday, August 10, 2019. It is when the foundations for her debut book Juggling Balls were first laid and there, at home in Elland, is where the book, which she is now looking to publish, begins.

Searching for reassurance

Feeling lost, alone and unsure if she should be doing more, Laura searched for something to read for guidance and reassurance. She wanted to know that everything she was thinking and experiencing was normal. She wanted to hear from someone who had lived what she was going through.

“You can get a lot from other people’s strength,” she says. “And I really wanted to know that what I was feeling was normal and whether this situation was normal. Was James supposed to behave in this way, was he meant to be this poorly? I had friends and family I could talk to but I didn’t know anybody who had been through what we had been through.”

Laura also hoped to read something from a mother’s perspective. She wanted to hear someone else’s experience of what they told their children, as she grappled with how much information to give daughter Poppy, now 11, and son Teddy, now seven.

“The kids were absolutely amazing and took everything in their stride,” she says. “When it came to actually talking about cancer, I don’t like the label to be honest, I really don’t like it. I never wanted to tell them that he’d got cancer.

“I would never hide anything from them but cancer has got so many negative connotations of people dying and I didn’t want to worry them. So I told them he wasn’t well.”

A tricky customer, she admits, she couldn’t find what she was looking for. She discovered factual books about the treatment process, books written by men with testicular cancer, spiritual books, those about cancer more generally.

But nothing, she says, from the perspective of the wife of a man with testicular cancer. Nothing she, a 36-year-old woman, who was juggling caring for her husband with looking after her two children, running two businesses, and “trying to be a good friend and well-rounded individual”, could relate to. And so she picked up her laptop and she began to write.

Sitting down to write

“I started a diary entry, saying what I felt, what I was experiencing. I never intended it to be a book, it was more something to fill my time whilst I was sat there,” she says.

It was also cathartic. She continued to write throughout James’ treatment, noting her thoughts and emotions and detailing appointments and how their journey was unfolding. But it was during the pandemic, with James in remission, and her work as a make up artist and as the owner of Star Power Theatre School in Halifax all but temporarily dried up, that the book began to take shape.

“When lockdown hit, I felt I wanted to go back to the diary entries and it was only then I started to think that what I had written there might actually help somebody else,” she says.

In October 2020, she started to elaborate on her notes, crafting, from her perspective, the whole story of James’ encounters with testicular cancer. The result is Juggling Balls, which takes readers on the journey of the Power family from 2013 to the present day, as they navigate two separate diagnoses.

Two diagnoses

Nine years ago, and just six weeks before the couple were due to marry, James was first told he had testicular cancer. He underwent an operation to remove the tumour and just 48 hours before they took their vows, they were given the news that the whole of the cancer was out and there had been no spread. “That was the best wedding present we could ever have got,” Laura reflects.

For six years, after going onto a medical trial, James, a procurement specialist at a bank, then had surveillance to monitor the situation. In March 2019, he was discharged, cancer-free.

But just six weeks later, the unthinkable happened. He found a lump. “I couldn’t get my head around it,” Laura, now 38, says. “In my mind I was like well you can’t have cancer again because six weeks ago they did your bloods, you had scans, they would have picked up on it. In my mind I kept saying it’s not cancer, it must just be something else.”

He was diagnosed again with testicular cancer, this time a different type. “Time was of the essence,” Laura recalls. “Obviously it had grown so quickly. It had gone from nothing six weeks ago to being big.”

An operation to remove the tumour followed but further checks indicated that cancer cells were still present. And so in August 2019, James began what would become his first of three rounds of chemotherapy. He is now just over two years free of cancer.

Dealing with emotions

“I refer to myself as a bit of a bionic woman,” Laura says, looking back to that period. “And it wasn’t until he was in his first round of chemo, that I cried about it all.”

“I get emotional now thinking about it,” she continues, a wobble in her voice. “But I didn’t then, I just couldn’t. There was too much going on. I needed to make sure my kids were alright, that everything was okay at home, continue working. I was just on a hamster wheel, just keeping going and going and going. It all hit me once he’d finished his chemo, once I knew he was fine, that was when I could start to address my emotions.”

One of the biggest factors to come to terms with was that her and James, now 39, would not be able to have any more children, with the removal of his second testicle. “I’ve come to terms with that more now,” she muses. “At the time I think I was just blanking it because I couldn’t deal with that on top of everything else.”

James’ cancer diagnoses also brought to the fore for Laura the realisation of life’s fragility. “James has had cancer twice and tinged into the back of my mind even to this day, there’s nothing to stop it coming back again,” she says. “It makes you realise how fragile life is and how amazing time is with somebody.”

Writing the book has brought back emotions that, at the time, Laura pushed to the back of her mind. There are still some parts that when she reads, reduce her to tears but it has helped her to process how she was feeling.

She hopes now that it will help others too, offering comfort and support to anyone who is going through, or has gone through, a cancer journey with their loved one. “I say now, that I’ve created the book that I wanted to find.”

Laura obtained a literary agent for Juggling Balls last November and they are now working on securing a publisher. It is her hope that a percentage of money from the sales of the book will go towards supporting a cancer charity.