Help to understand cancer

Debra Mortensen, aka Nancy George, has used her writing skills to craft <i>The Silent Scream</i>. PICTURE / PAUL BROOKS

Debra Mortensen has written a book about an all-consuming battle with cancer.
The Silent Scream documents the disease, its progress and how it affected her and her dying husband.

Although she now lives in a suburban house in a nice street, she and her husband Frank had come to Whanganui and set themselves up on a property at Longacre. They moved when Frank was diagnosed with cancer.
"We had to think with the head, not with the heart, so we came here," she says. It's close to everything they needed.
"From the moment he was diagnosed, you knew the only winner was going to be cancer."

It was during that time that Debra took up writing as a serious occupation. Using her parents' names to invent a non-de-plume — Nancy George — she wrote romance novels and became successful at it.
"I've been writing for five years, but I've always wanted to. When Frank got cancer I thought I needed to do something, so I started writing."

Debra writes in longhand in an exercise book, keeping away from the digital temptations of a PC.
"I write fiction where everything has a happy ending." The Silent Scream is not like that at all. No happy ending.

"When Frank was in Hospice they gave you this book for caregivers, an amazing book. It was like my Bible: it was glued to me, and I knew as I went through this book what stages he was at. It told you. It told you what signs to look for, so I was prepared ... but I wasn't."

After Frank died in November last year, everyone returned to work and life went back to "normal", but Debra went on a cleaning binge.
"I was like a woman possessed, but then you run out of cleaning and you just sit there." Reality hit. She was all alone.

Advice from a good friend was, "every invitation you get, accept". One such invitation was to attend a remembrance service at Dempsey and Forrest.
"I went there, by myself, and I sat there and looked around." She realised that she was in a room with people who had all gone through a similar experience. A slide show of photographs of the deceased played.
"What did it for me, like a slap in the face, was the last photo that came up was of a 5-year-old child."

"When I got home I thought, I have to do something or I will sit in the corner dribbling like a demented person. Loneliness is the hardest thing. Hence, I got Rosie." Rosie is a German shepherd pup.
"I got a big dog because it will make me get out and walk her."

Debra knew she had to put pen to paper for all the people yet to go through what she did.
"It's for everybody. The trouble with us as human beings is that we don't like to bother other people. That's what this book is all about: it's everything you'll go through." It's help for those who don't like to ask for it.
It has been called powerful. Tough men have cried reading it.

Frank was a big man. A butcher by trade and fond of the outdoors, he was a keen hunter. Not one to fuss, he chose a simple pine casket with rope handles.
"He was a Barry Crump: a no frills man of the land."

Now Debra has to learn to carve the roast ... among other things.
"No-one signs up for this, but it's a journey you take, and once you're on it, you can't get off until the Grim Reaper comes knocking," she says. Even then, there is a lot still to go through. "People will be doing the same thing — slightly different versions, but they'll still be going through what I went through."
The book is for all those people.

The Silent Scream by Nancy George is available on Amazon.
Debra, aka Nancy, still has a lot more writing to do.