You’ve just had a baby. Just imagine if you were told you were going to die.

My antenatal group was made up of the usual bunch of disparate people who make up parents. There were a pair of architects, a financial journalist and her husband, who lived in Islington. There was a nurse and her graphic designer other half, who subsequently got priced out of the Hackney housing market and moved to the seaside. There was a lady who worked at the BBC – her daughter is now in Jonah’s class at school, and they used to go to each other’s birthdays, but we hardly see each other these days. You know how it is.

There was an older American lady and her younger boyfriend, who kept a blog for their child moreorless from birth. There were a pair of teachers, lesbians who had used donor sperm. There was a city broker and his lawyer girlfriend, a mixed race couple with whom we became friends, before the banker was diagnosed with bi-polar shortly before the financial crash. After forewarning everyone about the imminent implosion of the financial markets (everyone thought he was mad!) he proceeded to spend all his money and live as a tramp, so we lost contact – his girlfriend subsequently got married and had two other children with her new lawyer husband. There was a yoghurt- weaving clothes designer and her somewhat reluctant partner, who lived in a teal coloured terrace in Stoke Newington.

It was, as you’d imagine, the sort of motley bunch who make up most antenatal groups. Just because you become parents, it doesn’t automatically mean you have much in common, but like most antenatal groups, we kept in touch for the early months and years of our first borns, as people drifted back to work or embarked on their second pregnancies. It was, in retrospect, a golden time, sharpened with the grit of sleep deprivation.

We were, most of us, still breastfeeding when Jonie, the clothes designer (she was actually lovely, even though she was a vegan) mentioned a lump in her breast. I dismissed it: my tits had been lumpy ever since Jonah had latched on for the first time – and besides which I was in the grip of PND, having not slept more than two hours together since his birth. But the BBC lady took it more seriously. Go and get it checked, she said. And checked she did. We watched as over the months, Jonie cut and then shaved her long blonde hair, becoming bed bound through chemo, her other half more than stepping up to the plate to become primary carer to her daughter, still barely a year old. She bounced back a bit, and we all went round to her house (I got a parking ticket that day) clucking over how much better she seemed, and sighing with relief that like us, she could now contemplate the future with her tiny daughter.

But the cancer came back and she died, having suffered a defeat so inhumane, I can barely articulate it. The pregnancy and breast feeding hormones romped it round her body like marauding rapists. Suffice it to say, it went to her brain, and she ended her days at a hospice in Hackney, whose little charity shop, ran by old ladies, I used to support when Tom lost his job in the years to follow.

I was barely pregnant with Ava as we went to her funeral, all of us with toddlers in tow, probably the last time we ever got together as a group. Her now husband made a tear jerking eulogy to a woman who had been, in everyone’s estimation, the last person they thought cancer would affect; as well as being a dedicated mother and all round good egg (even before the chemo.) And that’s the sort of joke she would have found funny too. She remained, in public, upbeat to the last.

So when I was approached by Cameron Von St James to write a post on behalf of his wife, Heather, who was diagnosed with Mesothelioma – a rare type of cancer caused by exposure to asbestos, three months after the birth of their daughter, Lily, I had some inkling of what they had been through as a family.

Mesothelioma is a particularly insidious form cancer which can develop many years or decades after exposure to asbestos. Asbestos was used as a building material throughout the 20^th century. Asbestos disturbance can cause dust, which, when breathed in, puts victims at risk of developing Mesothelioma. Once used in more than 3,000 consumer products, including, disturbingly, cigarette filters, it can be found in many homes, school and commercial buildings today.

Told she only had 15 months to live, Heather underwent a lung removal operation, and eight years later on, both she, and Lily, are doing very well. But it’s not often such a happy ending. On average most victims are given 10 years to live. That, according to Heather’s website, is 300 hours.

Today is Mesothelioma Awareness Day. And as this terrible disease can affect everyone, and because not enough is being done to protect people from aspestos exposure, it’s something worth knowing about.

Take care. RM x