31 January 2024 , 18:20
726
0
I've been up all night with neuropathic pain in my feet from Monday’s chemo. I’m now wearing the special compression socks Denise gave me for Christmas (top of a gal’s wishlist) which have cut outs where the toes should be.
I’m just relieved I had a gold pedi. Looking at those sausages is almost as bad as the pain! And it is real pain, pretty bad, but the letter in my hand is helping. The nurses on the ward handed it to me when I went in. It’s from a gentleman I’ve never met who wanted to thank me, and I can’t tell you how moved I am by it. His wife of 46 years died in October after her own cancer diagnosis, and he says her inspiration to fight was me. Me. When anyone asked how she was, she’d say she was “doing a Linda Nolan”.
They used to see me when I came in for chemo, he says, and they’d wave and I’d always wave back. Somehow, it was the thought of how I approach my illness that pushed her to keep going. He urged me to “keep on inspiring” – but he and his late wife have inspired me more than he could know. I’ve watched Maureen twice in Calendar Girls this week at Blackpool’s Opera House.
Coleen will be up here later this month to start her own one-woman show and I even went to my great-niece Ava’s performance of Little Shop Of Horrors, in which she was brilliant (naturally, she’s a Nolan after all). I’m full of pride for them but a little part of me misses being up there on stage myself. You ask yourself what you achieved in showbiz and think, “Well, I was on the side of a Blackpool tram” (an amazing moment… I’ll never forget Brian and I heading up to the pier to catch it).
And then I receive a letter like this and realise that this is what I have achieved. I talk about my cancer to try and help others to keep going, to keep popping some blusher on, to keep getting out and seeing folk… wow, I have so much to be grateful for, that I can do this for someone else. This gentleman’s wife will be my inspiration now. From this point on, I’ll be doing a Linda Nolan.
Warning as popular food and drink ‘increase risk of cancer death by up to 30%’