A Holiday To Heal

Zambezi island lodge is a balm for a couple emerging from a difficult period

- Aislinn Laing

When we booked the holiday, we didn’t know what the result would be, but with the odds of a clear scan at 95% we figured the chances of it being a celebration were good.

Eight months ago, my husband Hugo was diagnosed with testicular cancer and, despite an initial operation to remove it, it came back, so the chemotherapy he had dodged before was now unavoidable.

And so we embarked on the brutal few months of a process that everyone has heard about but assumes, and hopes, will be something they’ll never see close-up.

And it was fine, really, most of the time. Both being Brits, we repeated the mantra ‘one foot in front of the other’ each morning. I drove him to appointments and held his hand each time the needle went in. We hugged our boys hard, collapsed in front of box sets each evening and hoped for the best.

Chemo, however, coupled with full-time work and the erratic sleeping patterns, tantrums and exuberant mess of two toddlers, is tough. Hugo lost his hair, my jaw ached from the constant effort not to cry and we had started bickering about who had darker circles under their eyes. 

We needed a holiday, some time away from the daily grind and a chance to heal.

We love our boisterous little boys, aged almost three and four, and it felt a wrench to leave them after all the trauma we’d shared, but we both knew that some sleep and an uninterrupted conversation or two would ultimately make us better parents.

We made a list of the things we could do that so rarely happen these days: get drunk and not be too fearful of a 5am child wakeup on a hangover; play scrabble over a gin and tonic; read books. For Hugo, driving, camping, lighting your own fires and cooking baked beans on a gas stove under the stars are about the closest to perfect as it gets.