Sara Boucher
Your daughter needs to eat more salads.”
My nine year old self heard the doctor’s stern words and took to heart that he was calling me fat. I was an active child and my family mostly ate nutritious foods. But when we ate, we ate a lot.
In high school, my drive to be thin led to disordered eating: starving, bingeing, purging, cutting out whole food groups, and subsisting on sole food groups. Nothing got me closer to fitting into smaller jeans. After days or weeks of trying to lose weight I always gave up. There seemed no point in trying to reach always-unattainable weight goals.
At the time, I wondered why my body wasn’t considered good enough by societal measures and my doctor’s opinion when I could outswim and outrun my peers. Technically, I was healthy. Blood pressure? Perfect! Cholesterol? Perfect! Fitness? I had that, too. But my weight gave my doctor reason to believe I was headed for doom and gloom.
My next appointment for the Urology Department was 29 March. I was eager to get it under my belt, to get my results and be able to move on to getting the anticipated rebore. To my abject despair and shock, the doctor informed me that I had prostate cancer. Not only that, but it was Gleason Score 10, which is as high as the scale goes. The most aggressive and fastest-growing form of the cancer going. Ten minutes that changed my life.
In 2003, a year after our youngest daughter died, my husband Chris and I travelled from our home in New Zealand to Oman to live and work for a year. The challenges of living in this fascinating culture helped us learn to live with our grief in a way we couldn’t at home. Gradually I regained my ability to write. When we got back to New Zealand, I started recording our experiences from that time. This is one of the stories.
Kathryn Perks explains what prompted her to write a guide to putting our affairs in order before we die.
Dear Mr Riddell,