Donna and Debbie Bondings copyright Victoria Mary Clarke 2005
Donna and Debbie Mc Colgan are sisters.  Donna is thirty five, Debbie is twenty three.  There is a substantial age gap, so that when they were younger, they had separate interests and separate lives.  Donna was very much the big sister out in the world of work, while Debbie was the kid at school.  But when Donna was diagnosed with a tumour on her spine, in 1996, the girls were forced to become exceptionally close.  Donna went from being an outgoing, gregarious and very busy dietician, -who was working in Wexford and living with her fiance Bobby,- to becoming bed-bound twenty four hours a day for three years in a room that she now shared with her younger sister at their parent’s home in Dublin. 
It was an extremely difficult time for both girls as Debbie had to learn to look after Donna and Donna had to come to terms with the strain that her illness was putting on the entire family.  For Donna her life was turned upside down.
‘I was miserable,’ she says.  ‘My life was a living hell, just pure agony and the inability to do anything.’
For Debbie, it was also difficult.
‘I had to grow up very quickly,’ she says.  ‘Seeing your big sister who you looked up to suddenly become a mess is hard to deal with.’
The cancer diagnosis had been sudden and unexpected.  That day, Donna had woken up with what she thought was a kidney infection and while doing her usual hospital rounds at Wexford General, she asked some doctor friends to run tests.  An x-ray quickly revealed a sizeable tumour.
‘The tumour measured 25cm by 22cm,’ she says ‘About the size of a rugby ball.  I was rushed to see the consultant for immediate evaluation.
A couple of days later I was diagnosed with suspected Osteoblastoma. The only option was surgery. I felt very ‘matter of fact’ about this; I just felt that “Hey, I’ve a tumour. Get it out and I’ll be ok.”’
During surgery, the surgeon discovered that the tumour had caused substantial damage to nerves in her spine and this was causing pain.
‘I should have been relieved,’ Donna says, ‘But the pain was almost unbearable. It began in my lower back, radiated across my buttocks and down both legs. It felt as if someone was constantly sticking a hot knife into me. I couldn’t bend down or stand up properly and I was on constant pain killing medication.’
Donna was out of action for nearly seven years.
‘I was waiting five years to get a spinal pump, called an ‘intrathecal’ pump. It would be inserted sub-cutaneously, or, just beneath the skin and would deliver pain-relieving medication directly into my spine.
The operation carried a high risk of further spinal damage and even paralysis but I wanted it because, if successful, it would allow me to reduce my pain killing medication by 80% and, most importantly, allow me to walk again!’
During the wait, the operation to have the pump inserted was cancelled twenty one times.  It was sheer torture for the family.  Every day after school, Debbie went straight up to her sister’s bedroom and kept her company.
‘I wouldn’t be alive without Debbie, there’s no doubt about that,’  Donna says.  There are only the two girls and their brother Derek in the family.  The girls haven’t always been this close. Donna was away for seven years, in Scotland.
‘When she went away she was a real bitchy teenager,’  Debbie says.
‘We hated each other when we were younger!’  Donna laughs.
‘I was an annoying little sister, always wanting to hang around with her.’
‘We have a very good relationship now, I suppose that when I got ill, we became even closer.’
Was it frightening for Debbie, when Donna got ill?
‘Not really.  The way it was described to me, by my parents, she was just going to have a simple surgery.  The worst bit was when she came out of surgery and she was hooked up to machines.’
‘The operation was much more complicated then they originally said it would be.’
‘But you just get on with it.  I just helped her try and get better every day, you take every day as it comes.  You try to keep her hopes up.  I enjoyed being able to take some of the weight off my parent’s shoulders.’
Did the girls fight?
‘Donna was so sick that she would always give in if there was a fight, so no, we couldn’t really!’
‘I think I was using all the fight I had.  AS well as that I was feeling very guilty because of all the stress and strain I was putting on Mum and Dad and Debbie.  I was always apologising.  If an argument started I was always saying sorry, straight away, I wouldn’t fight back.
Debbie had put on a lot of weight during her sister’s illness.  She went up to fourteen stone, due she says, to a variety of factors, including being bullied at school and the emotional instability of the time, as well as the fact that she had to constantly fetch food for Donna.
‘I used to stay in the room with her and during the night she had to take tablets.  Whenever she took tablets, she had to have something to eat with them, so I would have to run down to the kitchen and make her something to eat.  While I was making her something to eat, I would have a nibble myself. It used to drive me wild!  It could be five in the morning and then you would have to try and get back to sleep and get up for school.’
‘I would always have loads of junk food in the room, because when you get sick it doesn’t matter if you are a dietician, everything goes out the window and you crave comfort food.  I had a terrible sweet tooth!”
Donna found a job as head dietician for an online weight loss company called Cafeslim, after she got better.
‘So Donna did research on me.’
I point out to the girls that in my experience it’s very easy to eat healthy meals, it’s the treats in between meals that are the problem.
‘There is an allowance for a few treats, you can still have chocolate, it’s just carefully rationed!’
Debbie found it easy to follow her diet and is now nine and a half stone.
‘I look forward to the weekend, when I can have a Chinese. I indulge myself at the weekends.  But during the week I am very good. All in all, it was easy, but the last few pounds were hard.  And over Christmas, I put on a few pounds. Luckily, I move around a lot with my job, I am responsible for fourteen branches of the bank.’
Looking back, Debbie says that her situation had been more emotionally taxing than she had realised at the time.  And being a comfort eater didn’t help.  But now that Donna is better and back at work, the two girls are happy and healthy and closer than they ever thought possible.
‘When I look back at it, I think how did any of us, particularly Donna go through that?’
‘It’s harder to watch somebody you love being ill than it is to be ill yourself,’ Donna admits.