I was 18 and discovered my mother had got breast cancer. I’d had a strange and somewhat prescient dream the night before we’d been told about her diagnosis: a baby floating in water, then a black background and a baby latched on its mother’s breast. ‘That’s me’, I thought, in regard to the baby, and ‘That’s Mum’. ‘Urgh! How strange!’ I remember thinking in my lucid, semi-dream state. Stranger still in the morning when I learned of her diagnosis. I later wrote this poem (for Mum): Your blood runs in my blood, So in suffering, I feel your pain, And the salt within your tears, when you cry, I share the grains. So when we feel alone and cold, We need not hide away. Fear still can’t taint the hope we hold, because love runs in our veins.