No time to freeze eggs
Pip about getting cancer as a young adult: “You are in such an important phase of your life. People move in together, work. The other person makes a long journey. I always lived at 130 km per hour, never had an opening in my agenda and suddenly that comes to a standstill, while everyone continues at that pace.”
She also hears at the age of 22 that there is a significant chance that she will not be able to become a natural mother. “There was no time to freeze eggs. I am better now and feel good, but it is possible that I will be confronted with the disease again in a few years. I find that difficult.”
From treatment to identity
The two leave little undiscussed in the series. The first episodes about the diagnosis and friendship are now online. What follows include themes of treatment, identity, fear and life after illness.
They explain how dynamics in friendships changed, but also how people sometimes fail to behave. “For example, when a friend blurted out: ‘ah, I really need to go to the hairdresser, my hair doesn’t look good’, she was shocked and said sorry. While I thought: please, come to terms with things like that and what’s going on in your life. My life is already so isolated.”
In the episode about life after cancer it will be about how the story does not end with ‘you are clean’. “For example, I have been very tired for months and sometimes I still can’t find words because chemo has entered my cerebrospinal fluid. Ruben, for example, is still undergoing therapy to process everything.”
