So I've been meaning to write here again for a while but as usual the stress of work started again and honestly, it's easier to try and avoid all things cancer when I'm feeling the pressure, despite the fact that it still seems to be everywhere. I'm not sure whether that feeling ever leaves you.
A couple of people I work with have had reason to consider the possibility of cancer and it brings it back to me when I'm trying to support them. I work in the health service and so there are reminders of cancer at every turn. First there were breast cancer awareness posters, now there are elderly cancers, prostate cancer and all manner of others on the toilet doors on every floor of the building I work in.
On the one hand, I'm thrilled that people are actively trying to ensure that people get things checked so that treatment can start early and people can survive. On the other, I really wish I could put cancer in a box and leave it there and sadly life refuses to make that a reality. Oh lovely, an advert on TV just informed me that a3 week cough might mean cancer. To be fair, this was followed up with an advery about the signs of strokes so basically it was a super cheery couple of minutes!
I've been slightly panicked over the last couple of weeks...more lumps! I know that a lot of the things I find are, and always will be, entirely innocent but I have developed a need to inspect and to identify; to reassure myself that it is only a spot, a rash, something that isn't likely to require another round of poisoning my body for the greater good. Quite apart from anything else, I really don't have time to be ill.
Anyway, my first post went on the Macmillan Today's Facebook page - https://www.facebook.com/notes/macmillan-today/this-wasnt-supposed-to-happen-to-me-im-not-meant-to-get-cancer/920857027927378
It's really just a mish-mash of lots of old blog posts from months ago. I sound rather far removed from the whole thing when I read it back and I guess some of these posts are like that. I will live on forever in a Macmillan book as Gingercat said and to be honest that's kind of nice. Slightly mortified that everyone I know can see it but at least they didn't publish anything about the less rational side to the cancer stuff...though I imagine that's infinitely more 'hard hitting'.
I finally 'womaned up' and told my friend who'd ignored me for months that she let me down. Only because she thought I was trying to have a go at her but it was a little freeing to just say out loud 'you let me down'. I'm sad to say she didn't get it. She apologised but where there should have been an acknowledgement that she ran away because she found it too hard, I was given excuses about her shift patterns and the problems in her own life. I have no choice but to accept it. I love her; out friendship will never be the same but I'm past the point in my life where I have any interest in fighting with the people I care about.
Cancer counselling has finished round 1. I have to go back (I'm waiting for my next appointment to come through) and some of her suggestions were truly a step too far for me but I learned a lot from it. I don't think I really talked about cancer much, more my heightened sense of death and the fact that it's going to meet me at some point. She means well and as a person I like her but I'm not sure I want to be as brutal with myself about dying. I do frighten myself sometimes and I'm not sure thinking about it more actually did anything to fix that. She's set me a lot of books to read, one of which is The Book Thief, which is a beautifully written book, narrated by death and set in Germany during World War II. I've got more or less to the end. There have been a couple of full on tearful moments and then I was informed by the narrator that not only does this poor character's brother, birth mother, best friend and several million Jewish people die, now her foster parents are both going to die along with the entire population of her street during an unexpected bombing. I shut the book over a week ago at that point and haven't opened it since. I need to because the thought of it I'm sure is infinitely worse than the way the wonderful writer has conveyed it but the mere thought was traumatising. I don't like to watch or read sad things. I don't want to be upset for entertainment. I will conquer the book but (and I know this sounds crazy because they aren't real) until I actually read it, it hasn't happened and this way I delay the inevitable deaths. This doesn't work in real life. I really wish it did. Maybe counselling isn't such a bad idea after all.
My last lot of bloods came back with raised liver results again so I've got to speak to the Haematologist about it in a couple of weeks when I'm back in to see him and then I think it'll just be another relatively quiet six months. Things are, despite my occasional stress face on the subject, getting there and looking up. I swing between believing it'll wake up and start growing all over the shop any minute now and thinking that I probably will be just like that woman who went 15 years without anything. I want it to be the latter of course but there's something comforting about people being there checking on it frequently too.
That's me though. 10 months since diagnosis and everything is fine. I just need to master the voice in my head that wonders when it won't be again. If anyone hears her, please do me a favour and tell her to shut up!
