Cancer gave me a gift

A devastating diagnosis taught Fi Munro, 34, how to really live

- SASKIA MURPHY

As a pod of bottlenose dolphins took turns to dive into the air and splash back down, I watched in awe. ‘Now, this is what life’s about,’ I grinned to my husband, Ewan, then 46, as we climbed back into our bright-yellow Volkswagen camper van.

‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ Ewan smiled from the driver’s seat as we continued our 500-mile loop around the Scottish coastline. Growing up in Scotland, I’d always dreamt of touring the North Coast 500 – one of the world’s most iconic coastal routes – in a VW camper, but had never got round to it. Work, social commitments, and training for marathons meant I’d always put it off ‘until next year’ – until the day I learned my ‘next years’ were running out.

I’d known something was wrong for months before I got the diagnosis. It’d started with a ruptured ectopic pregnancy in August 2015. Ewan and I were devastated as we’d been trying for a baby. I’d needed emergency surgery to remove the baby and my left fallopian tube, and afterwards, we allowed ourselves to grieve, yet the physical pain didn’t fade. I visited the GP with abdominal pains and swelling – but, aged 30 and with no family history of ovarian cancer, it was months before I was sent for tests.

Then, in January 2016, I got the diagnosis. The word ‘cancer’ rang in my ears as the consultant explained it’d started in my left ovary before spreading to my pelvis, abdomen, and chest. ‘It’s incurable,’ he said while I gripped Ewan’s hand. My cancer was advanced and could only be managed with chemotherapy. In other words, I was dying. Somehow, I held it together, even managing to crack a joke to Ewan about getting a dog, relying on my dark sense of humour to get me through.