I've come a little later to this blogging lark than I'd like and I feel if it's to be cathartic I need to get some of the finer and frankly less hilarious thoughts out of my head and into the world wide web. I apologise in advance.
I'm naturally one of life's worriers. I grew up quickly because of our family situation and it's left me overly cautious. I think part of the problem getting my head around this stuff is that cancer wasn't what I signed up for! Don't get me wrong, I am aware no one votes for their various illnesses but my family history on both sides tells me when my days are done I'll be having a heart attack. There's no cancer in my family so I had (wrongly as it turns out) assumed I'd never join the ranks of the oddly celled.
Finding it out hit me like a ten tonne weight on a trifle. I went to work and cried at my boss who is a bit of a rubbish boy on the emotion front and quickly told me I could have what ever I wanted/needed, I'm guessing because he was desperately hoping that would stop the female eye leaking.
I handled the whole thing pretty well for the first few weeks by not sleeping terribly well and working hard. Bizarrely it wasn't until the day before I finally got to see the haematologist when I started to give into the sheer panic of the unknown. Now I am self aware enough to know that if I push down my feelings long enough they'll come out in another way. It turns out not even cancer is immune to this wonderful reaction to stress. 1am on the morning of my appointment and I woke up realising I'd had pins and needles in my leg for about 5 hours. Do you think I sensibly assumed I had pinched a nerve? No of course not, I was convinced I had a blood clot and was a goner! Since I was panicking the pins and needles spread across my entire body and I woke my poor suffering fiance to tell him I was either dying or having a panic attack. Yeah....I was definitely having a panic attack. He tried to calm me down as best he could but in the end he had me walking around the block with him at 3am. He has the patience of a saint.
The following day I realised I had pins and needles in my hands again. I had them for about 3 days and in this time I decided I had diabetes, nerve damage and raynauds. Yeah... I didn't, I was stressed. My final stress displacement fun came a few days after that when my left arm shook for an entire day. For a while I thought I had an essential tremor. I did of course, eventually realise I was stressed and that the only way to get that processed was to talk about it. I'm not terribly good at that. I'm very good at joking and consoling and pretending everything will be OK. I'm also pretty good at panicking in the wee hours of the morning but actually facing someone and telling them how I feel, not particularly my idea of fun.
It's not that I can't talk to anyone, despite the reactions of some of the people around me. My father has been amazing and practical; my fiance is doing his very best to keep me smiling and is incredibly patient. I have some really lovely friends too who have let me rant and joke and threaten to staple cancer books to people's faces when I'm frustrated. I just tend to feel embarrassed or more anxious or guilty.
I feel especially guilty talking to my fiance. He is simply the best man I've ever known. I feel guilty though because he's already lost so many of his family to cancer. His mum was the most recent loss just over a year ago and it understandably destroyed him. I love this man more than anything in the world but he's the sensitive soul in our pair and I know the more I worry the more panicked he feels. Watching his mum recover from cancer, then find she had it again and that it couldn't be cured was very hard and I'd be lying if I didn't feel the twinge of worry in the back of my head.
In all probability I won't die from lymphoma. I know it's spread from it's original location. I got the gift of 3 new lumps that I discovered over the weekend while I was away at a friend's wedding. That doesn't mean it can't be zapped away though.
Tomorrow I have my scan and I shall do the sensible thing and suggest they have a look at them. I guess on the upside if I get enough radiotherapy tattoos I could be very own living human dot to dot. It's the only option for the random marks since they didn't seem terribly keen or impressed when I suggested jazzing them up with something a bit more interesting. Why not have the 'what radiotherapy tattoo would you like' book? At least then I'd feel I got a new tattoo out of it. Judging by the location of the lumps I've got at best I'll be able to do a dot to dot of a long star or perhaps a walking stick....how exciting!
