Ciara Mageean

But sprinkled in throughout that, I have lost my... That was the end of my athletics career.

I didn't really get to process that completely.

I was told that more than likely I won't be able to have a family anymore.

That news alone is tough for anybody, but it's just a small aspect of this big picture because I'm suddenly faced with my own mortality.

And I suppose the book gave me an opportunity to actually come to terms with some of those things.

I wouldn't say that they're fully processed and I don't know if they ever will be, but it just gave me an opportunity to revisit some of the things from my athletic career, both the highs and the lows, and begin to process those.

It also gave me an opportunity to put down in words things

how I was feeling throughout this cancer journey.

And that's been something that's been very cathartic for me.

And I do want to emphasize because it seems like I'm really happy and joyful and like I managed to handle this extremely well.

I have terrible days where I'm sitting on the sofa and I can't get myself up and really tough days post-chemo, but also just the days where my brain is just like...

I'm sad today and I'm just going to say, stay sad today.

Yeah.

Yeah, I suppose it's maybe a little bit in my nature where I just didn't want to make them sad.

And I thought, OK, I'll wait until I can sandwich some good news into the bad news.

So it's maybe a little bit of that empathetic side on my part.

But I will definitely say there's so many skills and attributes that my athletic career have given me that have really helped on this cancer journey.

The resilience and the ability to take on bad news and say, OK, we're going to focus on the process and what we can do next.

I think that's something that I definitely honed during my athletic career.

And the ability to deal with bad news is something that everything in life, the more you practice it, the better you get.