Nov 1st was the 4th anniversary of my diagnosis. I felt a bit queasy when I realised what the date was, but then I congratulated myself on lasting this long. I'm determined to make the five years at least, even though I'm not disease-free and never will be.
The week of radiotherapy passed very easily. In fact it was a bit like a holiday. I quite enjoy staying at the hotel, there was time to go sightseeing, visit galleries, and indulge in some retail therapy. I bought a slinky leopard print top and some skinny jeans for my new skinny figure, and had my eyebrows plucked in a department store. I was extremely touched also to have a visit from a different friend every single day that week. Two came up to Manchester all the way from London, and the other got up at 4.00 am to take the train up from South Wales. She stayed the night with me and we had a great time. What wonderful friends I have! I'm so lucky. Then John came up on the Friday to drive me home, because I was so full of painkillers by then I wouldn't have been safe to drive. I've had virtually no repercussions from the treatment, save for losing my voice for a day or two, but some say this isn't such a bad thing!
This week I've been very quiet. I don't sleep at all at night, probably because the docs have upped my dose of Dexamethasone (steroid). This has given me an appetite - it's so great to enjoy food again, and I've put on 2lbs already - but at the cost of sleep. So I try to go to bed in the afternoons, though I seldom sleep then anyway. In fact I have been doing chores around the house and garden,.
And of course I have been meditating. I find this incredibly grounding. I use a variety of tapes and CDs which offer varying amounts of guidance, but my favourite is just called 'silence with bells'. It starts off with a bell, then the bell rings at 5, 10 and 15 minute intervals, so you can let go, meditate for a pre-determined length of time, and not have to keep looking at the clock. You can find similar tapes on YouTube eg MindfulnessLancs do one.
But mindfulness is not just formal sitting meditation. When you attend a mindfulness course, you are encouraged to pick a daily activity and do it mindfully. This just means attending to what you are doing and not thinking about anything else. Most people choose something like cleaning their teeth. When I did the course, I rather foolishly chose picking up the dog poo, because that's something I do first thing every morning. Unfortunately, being mindful involves using all the senses, one of which is smell, of course! So I abandoned that idea pdq!
These days, I do activities mindfully on an ad hoc basis. Yesterday, for example, I was raking up leaves, and I adopted a mindful approach to the activity. In our garden we have a tree which we were told, when we first moved in, was called 'Golden Showers' and had lovely yellow leaves in autumn. Well, our first autumn we waited in vain for this golden glory, only to discover that the leaves turned a dark red instead of yellow. They are really beautiful nevertheless. I raked them up very slowly, admiring the colour and shape of the leaves, and packed them into bags with my hands to take to the tip. A mundane chore, certainly, but it feels quite different if you do it mindfully, you don't think about anything else at all except what you are doing, the beauty of the leaves, the physical activity of bending and gathering, the satisfaction of having tidied up etc etc Thich Nhat Hanh, of whom I've spoken often in this blog, talks about 'doing the dishes to do the dishes' , ie you do one thing at a time and that's all you do, you clear your mind of anything else. If you have cancer and you worry and fret about it, doing something mindfully is incredibly helpful - it gives you a respite from the constant churning of your mind. It helps, it really does, and it's so ridiculously simple.
