Getting the boots on again was the driving force. There’s no naivety here. She knows there’s still a distance to travel between getting well and getting back in the Test arena.
She doesn’t just want to come back, she wants to come back as a better version of her old self. That alone will be a challenge. Wassell played 54 consecutive games for Scotland at her peak.
“Hopefully this thing has given me a few extra years,” she laughs.
“Sometimes you cannot control your health but everything I’ve been able to control, I believe I’ve done. The goal is no sweeter than a World Cup, is it? That’s the ultimate. Some of the girls have given me a bit of stick. ‘You’re just wrapping yourself in cotton wool to get there!'”
The details of her treatment is the stuff of nightmares.
“The scariest bit was when I didn’t know what it was and they didn’t know how they were going to operate so I obviously had to get all these biopsies,” she explains.
“They initially went through my neck to get the biopsy and they couldn’t get enough cells so then they had to go through my ribcage to get under my sternum to get into the main part of the tumour to get enough cells to be able to get a biopsy.
“When you’re going through the rib to make sure that you don’t cause any damage, you have to collapse a lung to get there. When I woke up after these biopsies, I would say that was one of the hardest moments. My body was in all sorts of pain. I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t breathe properly, I had chest drains in which were extremely sore and I was in the high dependency ward in Edinburgh Royal Infirmary.
“There were a lot of very, very sick people in there and that was when I was scared. I’m almost crying out for… well… I didn’t have my mum there. She was a ray of sunshine in a room, a typically embarrassing proud mum. She was always watching me play. Honestly, with binoculars, couldn’t bloody see a thing. Didn’t know the rules. Didn’t matter. She was there, a constant.
“A lot of the reason why I wear a headband was so she could spot me. It was hard enough telling my brother about being sick because I didn’t want to put him through that. I would have hated putting my mum through it.”
Enter the Scotland team as auxiliary nurses.
“I live my life with a lot of humour so even when I am lying in my hospital bed with tubes coming out of me, please crack a joke,” she says.
“And they did and sometimes I would crack the joke and they’d be like, ‘Can we laugh? We don’t know’. We’ve been through a hell of a lot. It’s not just me. We’ve been through a huge journey together.”
Wassell joked with them that she’d be back in time for the Ireland game and the reaction was hilarious. Don’t even think about it, was the hysterical gist. They weren’t emotionally ready for her return. They wouldn’t be able to cope.
So, a warm-up game ahead of the World Cup is the hope and the plan. No matter where it is and no matter who it’s against, it will be special. The thought of it got her through the most awful time in her life and it feels more real now than at any point since illness got her.
If she keeps the tears at bay that day, she might be the only one.
