Hello there
I know, it’s been a while since I have written, well technically it hasn’t. I have written in between times but not posted. Why? Largely because I have been epically tired and partly, the ever present imposter syndrome.
So a little cancer catch up first before moving on to other things. Since I last posted I ended up having a little stay in hospital on IV antibiotics having picked up an infection. Less than two weeks later, I got myself a stomach bug. The thing with chemo is, it leaves your immune system whacked and you pick things up quickly but get over them slowly. I am becoming more anaemic with each treatment as my body is having to work super hard to deal with both the cancer and the chemo and I have also been coming off the extra steroids I was on for the swelling in my throat – all leading to immense tiredness that steals time and energy.
We remain in the precarious balance of hopeful and watchful as we know the cancer has made it to my spine and lungs, and yet, we can see some improvement in the disease in my neck and chest. So, we calmly just sit back and watch and take every day as it comes with no particular hopes or expectations, but merely observation and carrying on.
So that is where we currently are.
I have found that since having cancer I have often been asked life advice. On the one hand I am always saying, having cancer means that person is still that person and they haven’t changed – which is true. But, just as much, I can tell you that when you really are faced with your mortality, you do see and feel things differently and find yourself thinking a lot.
But life advice is tricky because I am still just human, and we humans are subjective creatures and very much not one size fits all. However in my latest round of steroid induced insomnia I did have some thoughts buzzing round my head reflecting on regrets and any advice I can give from them.
I try not to go in for regrets much, it’s pretty pointless, if a thing is done it cannot be undone but there are insights we can take from the experiences that leave us with those cold feelings of wishing we had done things differently and this first is the one that haunts me the most.
Hurting people: I, as far as I can think, have never consciously gone out of my way to hurt someone. But, being a human being living amongst others, I know that in the course of my life I have unintentionally done so. Whether through completely unconscious actions or from silly behaviours that in turn were no good for me either, it of course has happened, I don’t believe there is anyone out there who can say differently. But what do we do with these regretful moments? I think that if you are close enough to the time they happen there is the chance to try and apologise, if that is what is needed, and to set things straight. You may not get the forgiveness you would like, depending on how the other party are able to process the situation at that time, but you can try. However, I am not a great believer in suddenly raking up old inflicted pain. If enough time has passed and the person you have upset in a lifetime before has not reached out to you for explanation or the such, then they have perhaps found their own way of dealing with and moving on from the situation. For you to suddenly re-enter into their lives bringing it back, feels a little selfish. Instead it might be better to find a way that you can lay that particular regret to rest for yourself instead of reigniting it for the other person. These are just my thoughts and I have not yet fully followed my own advice as there are fleeting moments of recall about some of my past behaviour that make me cringe with absolute shame with how I now see my actions may have hurt someone. But I don’t believe that carrying that shame forever is a good thing for anyone and so I am working on coming to peace with the fact that I did some silly things but it serves me and no one any good purpose to bring them any further with me and am trying to put them down marked as a learning experience.
Onto slightly less intense advice: look after your feet. I did all my growing early and then stopped by age twelve and this meant that my feet were always big for a child. Big, wide and with a very high arch. As a result the shoes for girls my age just didn’t fit me. Oh, I longed to be able to wear the pretty little shoes with a t-bar that everyone else had, but for me it was lace up boys shoes. (One pair of which actually had a totally cool mini ball bearing maze embedded in the sole which at the time I did not appreciate enough.) I grew up with a bit of a resentment towards my feet as they would never be encased in pretty ‘lady’ shoes, so it was probably a good job that I fell into being a teen of the grunge era and lived many years in DM’s and Converse. I did wear heels at work but I kept them under my desk, walked in in my trainers, sat with shoes off and only put them on when I needed to walk across the office. Now, thanks to chemotherapy I have neuropathy (nerve damage) in my feet that on bad days means I can barely walk. Sometimes, before I am even out of bed in the morning they are so painful the thought of putting weight on them to stand up actually makes me cry. So, if you are lucky enough to have good working feet, love and take care of them whatever their size or shape.
And in a similar vein: love your body. I am finding that the more my body goes wrong, the more I am trying to tell it I love it (including singing it silly made up songs in the shower about how brilliantly I think it’s doing). I may not necessarily like everything about it (I am still being very stroppy about being bald and having put on weight due to steroids) but I do love it because it has taken so very much and still does from both the disease of cancer and the intense treatments of chemotherapy, surgery and radiotherapy and all the supporting drugs – and still it stands. As I mentioned above, I did all my growing at an early age and then stopped. This meant that I was the big girl at school for some time and consequently did not think good or happy things about my body. Then came the teen years where I no longer grew but everyone else did. And, it was the time of the lads mags and wonder bras where if you were not skinny and hugely endowed (which I wasn’t and am not) then you were not considered a woman to be interested in. Cue, another period of time where I thought less than kind things about my body. I can feel very sad now looking back at how I spoke to myself then because there was nothing wrong with me and now with a body playing host to a disease trying to kill it, I find I can only feel love for it and want to nurse, hold and praise it for trying so very hard.
The last thought I had before sleep eventually came was: keep up your fitness levels. Eugh, exercise, I hate it and always have done. Even when I was younger and super fit, captain of the netball team, played hockey, even represented the school in a county-wide event in the one and two hundred sprint (of which I won the two hundred) I hated it. Post school came those glorious years of early to late twenties where everything is possible, you have all the energy, you work hard, play hard and somehow your body keeps up with it all without seeming to try. But after that, oh dear, it gets harder to maintain and even harder to recoup. I had just turned thirty-five when I was first diagnosed with cancer seven-and-a-half years ago and since have attempted various stabs at trying to get some fitness back. But years of treatment and its side effects have made it very hard and I wish I had kept some element of fitness going beforehand. Now, with the tiredness mentioned above, the neuropathy and tachycardia (fast heartbeat due to the body having to work so hard to deal with disease and chemo) I find that even walking upstairs gets me out of breath.
These things may not sound like the deep advice you would expect from someone with incurable cancer: recognise your mistakes but don’t carry them with you for a lifetime, look after your feet, love your body and keep some element of fitness going. You may have expected more along the lines of: I wish I had gone to university, travelled the world, made more money, but, as ever on this trajectory I find myself on, it is the simple things that feel the most important and true.
I don’t think regrets are helpful as they are backwards facing and we really don’t have the time or capacity to live in the past as well as the present. We can acknowledge things we perhaps wish we had done differently and learn from them to use in the present but to bring them along with us is merely dragging a weight of burden that will stop us living life fully now. And now is all we really have.
I may now go and give my feet a soak and moisturise and most importantly – tell them I love them.