Women’s Mini Marathon: ‘When I do the run, I’ll be thinking, if my husband can get through his chemo, I can get through this’

Darragh was on the Ballyboden senior football team, so the newlyweds just assumed it was an injury he picked up on the pitch. “When anything happens to him, we just automatically put it down to, ‘oh, must be just a sports injury’. We didn’t even worry about it, but we did get it checked by the GP pretty much straight away,” Lauren says. Even the doctors presumed it would turn out to be benign, but did send him for an MRI.

It was after they returned from watching their best friends get married, with Darragh as the best man, that they received news that would change everything. “That’s when we got the call that the MRI was suspicious. That was the last day of everything feeling normal, to be honest,” she remembers.

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The doctors soon knew Darragh had cancer, but they weren’t sure what kind it was. During the lengthy process of discerning what to diagnose him with, Lauren discovered she was pregnant. “Those next four weeks were just both of us going back and forth for tests,” Nelson says.

But there was bad news awaiting them both. The baby wasn’t growing the way they would have hoped, and Lauren suffered a miscarriage. At the same time, her husband’s diagnosis was a sarcoma so rare that he is the only person in Ireland who has it.

Treatment would entail surgery — which Darragh went into not knowing whether or not he would be able to keep his arm — radiation and then chemotherapy. Conversation soon turned to his fertility, and whether it would be impacted in the future.

“We just really wanted to give Molly a sibling and we said ‘let’s just give it one chance before radiation starts because we just don’t know what’s around the corner’. We didn’t, for a second, really think we’d be lucky enough for it to happen,” Lauren says.

“I lost both my grandparents in the past year, but the day after we buried my nanny, we found out I was pregnant again, a week before Darragh started radiation therapy. It felt like a real gift from my nan.” The couple soon welcomed their second daughter, Sophia.

This June, Lauren is running the Vhi Women’s Mini Marathon in aid of Sarcoma Cancer Ireland, a non-profit providing support for patients and families throughout the country. “I found the SCI Instagram on a really dark day just before Darragh’s surgery and Carol (one of the main volunteers/patient herself) responded to me immediately through their DMs and gave me so much hope and continues to be a person I reach out to for advice,” Lauren explains.

“She always checked in on us throughout the past year and the charity provides patient grants, free counselling, monthly support groups, patient information days and a WhatsApp group for patients and carers to vent, share stories and ask questions.”

The race also serves as a personal challenge — one that has been a welcome distraction from the stress of her husband’s illness and all that goes along with it. “I’m not a huge runner or anything like that, but obviously after the year that we’ve had, I kind of just wanted to give myself a goal that was just for me. Obviously everything was quite intense last year and exercise or anything like that was put on the back burner,” she says.

“I just set a goal, and the mini marathon was kind of like the perfect opportunity to have something that was a way to build myself up to and that I could actually do some good as well, like with raising some money,” she adds. Besides, thanks to her husband’s many years on the pitch, she has the perfect personal trainer at home.

Throughout the past few years, despite the hardships that have been suffered, the Nelsons are a united front. “You don’t know how you’re going to respond in these situations. If someone told me three years ago that something like this would happen I don’t know how I would have been able to get through it but like there’s something… we just honestly day-to-day are so happy in where we are right now with the girls,” Lauren says.

“People would think the last year has been pure doom and gloom in our house. And yeah, there have been really scary moments and stuff, but he [Darragh] just knows he can fight this. Like, he’s so positive in a way that’s not just pretending to be. I fully believe that he believes in his soul that everything’s going to be okay, and that makes me feel okay.”

The mantra they have been repeating is one Darragh has tattooed on his wrist, as a reminder from his football days. WIT, or Whatever It Takes. “He’s so, so strong. I can’t describe how he takes all of this in his stride, because people wouldn’t believe it. I remember saying to the doctor, ‘what about football? Football is what he does, it’s his life’. Darragh was so pragmatic. He was just like, ‘we’ll just do whatever we need to do’, like, whatever it takes,” she says.

When it comes to the 10km that lies ahead of her this June Bank Holiday weekend, that same affirmation is what’s going to get her over the finish line. “When I’m running, I can only get 3/4 km at the moment, but I’m like, if I could get through the marathon of last year, I can get through this run, I can do this. Even when I went to give birth to Sophia, all I was thinking about was if Darragh could do what he was doing every three weeks; going in for chemotherapy, being away from us for over a week each time, I can do this. Sophia was born in an hour and a half,” she says with a laugh.

“I’ve set myself a target of 90 minutes to do this [run] and I don’t want to jinx myself or anything, but I feel like I can… I know I can do it because I know that I’ll just be thinking if we could get through the year that we had last year, I can do this.”

​The Vhi Women’s Mini Marathon takes place in Dublin on Sunday, June 2. Sign up at vhiwomensminimarathon.ie