One of the shitty things about being human is that some of us sometimes get really sick. A will-I-live-or-will-I-die sort of sick. As a collective we spend our lifetime trying to outrun our own mortality so being forced to face it makes people feel a bit ick inside. We feel inadequate because we don’t know what to do or the right thing to say. The thing is when someone gets sick (the live-or-die kind of sick) there is no right thing to say. But if there was, ‘let me know if you need anything’ (LMKIYNA) isn’t it. Continue reading “‘Let me know if you need anything.’”
I am a little bit obsessed with Facebook’s ‘On this day’ feature. I get excited when the clock ticks past midnight and I can see what memories I’ll be reminded of! Most of the time I am disappointed at just how uninteresting some of my posts were, but there are always the ones that make you laugh or that are accompanied by photo’s you forgot had been taken. Then there are the ones that knock the wind out of your sails – memories with friends you no longer see, pictures of people whose lives have been lost, and for me, memories BC/DC – before and during cancer. Continue reading “Facebook and the persistence of memory.”
In the last 3 months I’ve written plenty of things that should have made it on to my blog. Funny things, cancer-related things, non-cancer-related things. But they never seem to quite get there because I get distracted, or I get tired, or I worry it’s too negative, or I binge-watch something on Netflix. You’d think that not having to work would mean I had all the time in the world to be doing the things I want but it hasn’t really worked out that way. Continue reading “What comes next?”
Time to rest and recharge.
I can’t believe it is almost Christmas Day. No matter how prepared you are somehow you always seem to get behind and in a rush. So many things to be done in addition to the every day stuff that needs to be done. And this year it seems I broke myself. Continue reading “Time to rest and recharge.”
1 year since surgery.
There are a lot of milestones in life. The firsts. The lasts. The anniversaries. The befores. The afters. Some milestones stand before us all and others are reserved for the select few – the lucky, the unlucky. Today is one of those milestones for me. It is a year ago today that I was wheeled in to surgery to rid my belly of cancer. Continue reading “1 year since surgery.”
Part and parcel of dealing with cancer is tests – blood tests, CT scans, MRIs. In the space of about a month last year I’d had two CT scans, a PET scan, two blood tests, an appointment with a gynaecological oncologist, a colonoscopy, gastroscopy and a laparoscopy. I felt like a radioactive pincushion. Continue reading “Scanxiety”
With the exception of my previous post, I hadn’t posted in a month and a half. I don’t normally make a point of addressing my laziness. I usually just post and hope nobody notices. I’d like to say it’s because I’ve been busy living a fabulously glamorous life and have been too busy to sit down let alone create, but sadly, the opposite is true. I have had plenty of time, just not the drive. To say things have been rough would be understating things. Continue reading “Breathe in. Breathe out. Repeat.”