It has been a difficult few years for Michelle Jenkins, but sitting in her front room in Stonehaven, all she can see is the funny side.
“It’s been 99% laughter,” she says.
The 49-year-old endured several gruelling rounds of chemotherapy after being diagnosed with Hodgkin lymphoma in January 2022.
She lost her hair, was so weak from the treatment she could hardly stand and though is now in remission has yet to get the all-clear.
So amidst all this turmoil, what’s been providing the laughter and light in this dark period of her life?
The busy home at the heart of Michelle’s life
There’s a lot of laughter in Michelle’s house. In fact, there’s a lot of many things — friends, family, friends of family, passersby, neighbours.
Michelle grew up in Aberdeen’s Garthdee, on a street where everyone knew everyone and were always popping into each others’ houses.
She even married a neighbour — husband Paul’s parents owned the shop on the corner.
So when she moved to Stonehaven 21 years ago with Paul and four children in tow, Michelle recreated what she’d always known.
Neighbours became close friends and the children — Chelsea, Megan, Mason and Ethan — ran wild across the neighbourhood.
And at the centre of it all was Michelle and Paul’s house on Glenury Crescent, the hub through which a busy social calendar thrummed.
A little thing like cancer wasn’t going to stop that.
“We’d just treat the whole thing as a joke,” says Michelle, who remembers howling with laughter with her sister as they tried out a selection of wigs when her hair started to fall out from the chemotherapy.
There was also the relentless ribbing from her family, who would tell her she was playing the cancer card when she tried to get them to do things for her.
More recently, she’s been making her granddaughter laugh getting to grips with the moves for her appearance next month at Courage on the Catwalk, the Friends of Anchor charity fashion show at P&J Live in Aberdeen.
She admits all this laughter might seem odd to some, but it’s exactly how Michelle wants it.
“I remember one of Mason’s friends told me that he thought I made it really easy to come round here because you make a joke of it,” she says.
“I think talking about it helped me deal with it.”
A lump in the neck and Michelle’s cancer diagnosis
Of course, it wasn’t quite so funny at the start, back in December 2021 when Michelle found a lump in her neck. It was about the size of a golf ball, so she got it checked out.
“They asked if I had any symptoms and I said no. But Hodgkins must have been mentioned for some reason so I googled it at home and thought, ‘I’ve got all those symptoms’.”
She was itchy, especially her legs. “I could have clawed them off they were so bad,” she says.
Michelle also had night sweats that had her changing her sheets every day.
Plus, she was tired all the time. “So extraordinarily tired.”
She had put it all down to menopause, but the googling gave her second thoughts.
She called the doctor back and eventually, after many follow-up phones calls by Michelle, was booked in for a scan.
“The day after the scan I was at work and the hospital phoned at ten past one,” she says, remarking on the oddness of remembering the exact time. “They asked if I could come up before two, so I knew instantly.”
‘We tried to see the good side to cancer’
The lump turned out to be just fat. But the biopsies uncovered something else and Michelle was diagnosed with stage 2B Hodgkin lymphoma, which attacks the body’s immune system.
The condition is a cancer, though Michelle and Paul initially didn’t call it that.
“We called it the lymph,” Michelle says with another laugh. “Cancer can sound like a scary word to a lot of people. We tried to see the good side to it, rather than be negative.”
She treated the condition as informally as she could. She’d mention the diagnosis while in conversation with friends, to the extent that they were surprised at how “normal” she was about it.
“Obviously it wasn’t normal, but that was just my way of dealing with it,” Michelle says, adding that maybe people expected her to break down.
“But I never. Not once.”
At her back was her circle of family and friends, with whom she shared every prognosis, every step and every appointment. She put it out on Facebook; she even did videos about it on TikTok.
All of that, she says, was she didn’t want others to feel they couldn’t speak to her about the cancer. She worried people would cross the road just to avoid an awkward conversation.
Underneath that impulse was the shadow of the first cancer that upended Michelle’s life; the one her mum contracted when Michelle was just 30.
“I found it easier talking about cancer,” she explains. “And I think that came from my mum. Because she didn’t talk about it.”
‘I asked if she’d still be here at Christmas’
Michelle’s mum Fran died of cancer in 2005. She knew her bowel cancer was terminal but, says Michelle, “she just didn’t want to know”.
Fran’s refusal to talk about her condition was total. At the hospital, Michelle would go into a side room with doctors who would give her the latest on her mum’s condition. She’d then go back to her mum and pretend she didn’t know anything.
“I remember going to an appointment in August and she was not great at this point. In the side room I asked if she’d still be here at Christmas, and they said no, she’s just got weeks.”
Michelle then went out and sat with her mum, unable to say the many things she wanted to.
“I had to come out there and keep this… face on,” she explains.
How Michelle’s cancer allowed her to understand her mum
Michelle’s own diagnosis brought many of those memories back — and not just for Michelle.
Initially, her cancer sparked complex emotions in oldest daughter Chelsea, who was a young teenager when she watched her mother cope with her grandmother’s death and is now the same age Michelle was back then.
“She used to say as I was getting diagnosed that it was very deja vu for her,” Michelle says. “I think she found it hard because she knew what had happened with my mum.”
At the same time, Michelle’s own attitude to her mother’s reaction to her cancer changed as she dealt with her own.
“I remember one day actually crying after I’d gotten better, saying I now know what mum went through,” she says. “I don’t think you realise what it is.”
‘If you got dressed, it was a good day’
Even Michelle found it difficult to smile through her chemo.
She remembers being so weak from the injections she could hardly walk and it took all of her support network to get her through some tough days.
“If you got dressed, it was a good day,” she says.
The one upside was that it introduced Michelle to Friends of Anchor, the Aberdeen-based charity that supports cancer and haematology patients.
Michelle was a regular visitor at the Anchor unit, the charity’s care ward at Aberdeen Royal Infirmary.
She wasn’t allowed to bring her own family with her to the unit, but among the Friends of Anchor volunteers and fellow cancer patients she sound found another.
“My family and friends were just amazing, I couldn’t have asked for better,” Michelle says. “But because they couldn’t come with me, [the Anchor unit] became like my other family.”
Climbing Ben Macdui and walking the Courage catwalk
Michelle is now in remission from her cancer and gets checked every three months. She’s thrown herself into recovery – long been bitten by the travel bug she’s back holidaying with Paul around the world.
Closer to home, she managed to bag a Munro by climbing Ben Macdui, Scotland’s second-highest peak.
“I was breathing out my arse to say the least,” says Michelle, laughing at the memory. “I thought there was no way I was going to make it, but I did.”
She is also now a Friends of Anchor volunteer herself.
Last year she helped out at Courage on the Catwalk, the annual show that takes 24 women who have cancer or survived it and turns them into fashion models.
This year, Michelle will walk the catwalk herself after securing one of the coveted spots in February.
She freely admits she’s nervous about the big event, which will attract a crowd of 750 on each of the two nights it’s being held.
Michelle also knows it could be an emotional occasion for those on stage and friends and family in the audience.
But if she enjoys it as much as the models last year then she knows she’s in for a good time.
“I don’t remember anybody crying,” she says.
“Everybody was just smiling.”
Michelle has set up a JustGiving page to raise money for Friends of Anchor. You can donate here. Meanwhile, find out more about this year’s Courage on the Catwalk here.