“Recovery taught me to value quality over quantity.”
One of the things nobody prepared me for after my brain tumour diagnosis was how much some of my relationships would change.
When you’re facing something life-changing, you quickly discover who your support system really is.
Some people showed up in ways I never expected.
They checked in.
They listened.
They stayed.
Even when they didn’t always know what to say.
Those friendships became lifelines during some of the hardest moments of my recovery.
But not every relationship survived in the same way.
Some friendships drifted.
Some people became uncomfortable around illness.
Others simply didn’t know how to navigate what was happening.
At the time, I found that incredibly painful.
I sometimes took it personally.
I wondered whether I’d done something wrong.
Whether I’d changed too much.
Whether I was somehow harder to be around.
Looking back now, I realise most people were doing the best they could with a situation they didn’t fully understand.
Serious illness can make people uncomfortable.
Not because they don’t care.
But because they don’t know how to help.
And sometimes they worry about saying the wrong thing, so they end up saying nothing at all.
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learnt over the last 18 years is that friendships often reveal themselves during difficult seasons of life.
Some relationships become stronger.
“Sometimes support is simply the people who keep showing up.”
Others fade naturally.
And occasionally, completely unexpected people become incredibly important.
Recovery taught me to value quality over quantity.
To appreciate the people who stayed when life became messy, uncertain and difficult.
The people who didn’t need me to be positive all the time.
The people who accepted both the strong version of me and the struggling version of me.
Those are the friendships I treasure most today.
Because surviving a brain tumour taught me that support isn’t always measured by grand gestures.
Sometimes it’s measured by the people who simply keep showing up.
Eighteen years later, that’s something I’ll never take for granted.
Tomorrow I’ll be sharing another lesson from the last 18 years of surviving, recovering and rebuilding life after a brain tumour.
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A Brain Tumour’s Travel Tale: Cards on the Table, I Pooed Myself
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