Autumn and Winter passed me by in a kind of blur, I can remember lying in bed looking out of the window, I noticed one of my neighbours poodling around her garden, she didn’t know how lucky she was, most of us take everything for granted you just sail along and then one day boom your whole life is turned upside down and your stuck in bed feeling really awful!

My life turned into a pattern I was having the chemo every three weeks on a Wednesday, the side effects would come out over the weekend, so on a typical Saturday I would wake up at about 6ish and my husband would make me tea and toast straight away and then at about 10 I used to have a full English! He would keep me fed like this all weekend as it really helped to keep away the feeling of nausea. It is hard to describe how I felt, the only way really is to imagine the worse hangover you have had and multiply it by 100! Usually by Monday I would start to feel a bit more human so it wasn’t too bad. My strength quickly went and I used to do as much as I could in the morning as by the afternoon, I would be laid up on the couch in front of the telly! Thank goodness I had cable!

As I was allergic to the taxol, I didn’t lose my hair so it was a good job that I didn’t shave it off after all, that would have just been my luck! Short hair definitely doesn’t suit me as I found out on the kibbutz!

One of my friends was a hairdresser by trade and one of the first things that I asked for when we arrived in Israel was a punk haircut! I wanted it to be shaven on both sides and left long on the top and back, I am not sure what happened but the communication between seemed to have gone a bit haywire! I looked into the mirror excitedly and to my horror I didn’t have any hair, instead I had an egg head save for the whispy bit she had left near my neck! Everyone thought it was really funny of course! I took to wearing a baseball cap all the time to hide my bald barnet!

In fact everyone used to make me wear it while we hitched for a lift as one look at me without it and the drivers foot used to push down harder on their gas pedal! One day we managed to get a hitch from a farmer he kindly stopped and the three of us piled into the back of his old car, he dropped us at the beach, as we started to climb out he asked us to mind the eggs he had stacked up on the floor! Why oh why am I so clumsy, sometimes I am like a magnet to disaster! I lost my footing and crunch my big size 7 went straight through the middle! I quickly jumped out and off we sped!

We used to spend hours at the beach just lazing around, one of my friends just had to look at the sun and her skin would turn a lovely shade of brown, while I and my other friend were very fair skinned and we would turn a lovely shade of red! I can remember us sitting either side of her looking like the before and after ad for bergasol, we had the last laugh one day though! On one of our many trips to the beach she wore a lovely white halter neck bikini which really complimented her lovely tan and set it off to a T. As a boring non swimmer, I stayed put on the sand while everyone swam, as I sat there relaxing, my friend came out of the sea, she shook her hair back and started to do her ‘Bo Derek run’ back to me, I couldn’t stop laughing, I glanced down and noticed that her lovely white bikini bottoms had turned completely see through and my beautiful dark haired friend was exposed! I laughed and laughed, at first she thought I was laughing with her so she really played up to it, but it didn’t take her long before she realised something was wrong. It seemed as though it was happening in slow motion as she glanced down and looked up at me horrified as she tried to run back to me covering her modesty! It was so funny!! We still laugh about it today!