As an ex-infant teacher, I know that if you focus on misbehaviour, the other children tend to join in because that is what gets your attention. When we were all sitting as a group, I had 3 stages for dealing with misbehaviour: 1) Compliment the children behaving well. That had the effect of pulling all the other children into line and often stopped the misbehaviour, 2) If needed, a support staff member would sit by the child and encourage them quietly, or sometimes just to be with them was enough, particularly when we understood the causes and the child, 3) the support staff member would remove the child; sometimes they needed a quiet chat (often they had a good reason that needed hearing), sometimes they could not cope with large groups but were fine with some 1-1 time, sometimes they struggled to sit still and listen and were better where they could move.
I regard my cancer cells in my body as the misbehaving cells. As in the classroom, I focus on looking after the good cells. At this point in my imaginings I move to a national level. I imagine I am a queen with a country to care for and while the anarchic factions are starting to cause trouble, I isolate them by looking after the good cells through diet, exercise, fresh air, meeting friends and generally looking after myself better than I've ever done in my life. I accept the bad days and the tiredness, and allow my body to rest through those. Whilst I am doing that, I have an army of medics who are working on destroying the cancer cells (this is where the classroom analogy falls down! We never brought in the army). The medics have weapons that I do not understand at all - there is only so much that Google can tell you. They have chemicals, knives and radiotherapy. I am hugely grateful that they have them and know how to use them, that they seem to have an understanding of how my cancer cells normally behave and can target them without too much collateral damage. I regard my meetings with the medics as their reporting back to me and try to be as informed as I can. But meanwhile, I support the good cells and imagine that in so doing I am giving them the confidence and strength to stay well so that together we can contain the cancer cells and continue to enjoy life.
It's all in my imagination, but I tell my friends and family that I am not fighting or battling cancer; I have an amazing support team of medics doing that for me. I am concentrating on staying well and so how about we go somewhere nice for a walk and a cup of coffee, and a good catch up about the world outside cancer
