One of the most horrible things about having cancer, is having to give people bad news. Having to tell those you love something you know will cause them pain is dreadful. Then there is having to tell everyone else; repeating the facts over and over is like hammering your own pain and grief wide open at a time when you would rather hide from it. But, it is not something you can’t speak about forever.
To this end, here is my update. My treatment has not gone fully to plan. Three weeks ago I had my surgery to have affected lymph nodes removed. All went well albeit taking a little longer to heal than would be hoped. However, a week ago I got my results and well, they weren’t quite the good news we had been hoping for. The cancer had spread further than had been thought and had reached the third layer of lymph nodes under my arm, which are in essence, the last bastion before things go heading off elsewhere around the body. I am waiting for scans to try and see if it has spread anywhere else.
In the meantime we have to deal with what is known and so as soon as my surgery has healed I will have three weeks of daily radiotherapy and then be put on another chemotherapy for three to four months.
This has been an absolute blow and I have to admit, very hard to take. Instead of my treatment being nearly at an end, I find I am pretty much back at the beginning. The unknowns are too much for me to think about.
I am sorry to deliver this news to you but it wouldn’t feel right to say nothing and carry on interacting with people pretending all was going okay.
A strange thing has happened. I have completely lost my creativity. For the whole thirty-nine years of my life I have always had more creative things on the go than I could possibly actually do; songs, poems, stories, crafts knitting, crochet (this last quite badly done). It disappeared about a week before my surgery, I just assumed it was nerves and would return, but as yet, it hasn’t. Instead I have done a lot of thinking, over-thinking and deliberately trying not to think and it seems there is a very thin line that divides these things and too much time spent in any is not a good idea.
I think, when you have truly felt the truth of your mortality, it is something that can’t be un-felt. So many difficult things happen to all of us in our lives but we often fall back on, ‘But, at least it won’t kill me.’ When something happens and you can no longer say that, it tends to stop you in your tracks a bit.
I have found, that with the new depths of grief, sadness and fear which sometimes can feel too much to take, I have also experienced higher highs of love and joy. The silly pettiness of every-day worries has gone, they seem too small to give precious time to. The places I found happiness before, can bring almost unbearable joy now; you are as likely to find me crying from joy as you are of sadness, these days.
I honestly don’t know what lies ahead. I am trying to live by perhaps the most used maxim; one day at a time. I, as most of us, have said this phrase so many times, but it is only now I can see how important it is. Without wishing to sound like an intolerable hippy, there is so much beauty, love and joy out there, that even on your worst days, if you look for it, it can be found in the pockets between harder times. I intend to fill my pockets with these gems and I hope you do too.
I am sitting writing this not looking at all how I want to, with just the tiniest fuzz of hair. I have a medical drain going into my side, which is doing its best to ruin all my clothes by leaking all the time and I have a barrage of hospital appointments ahead. But I have just been out for a walk in the most glorious sunshine. The birds are singing their hearts out and spring flowers are polka-dotted everywhere in purples, yellows and whites – and all I can see is beauty.
