Moving on

I cycled into town today to do some shopping, it's bloody freezing and my hands turned to ice because I forgot to wear gloves, but life is too short to be spent sitting in a queue for the car park and I had a very important mission; buying a dress for my work Christmas party! This time last year I had just started chemo and I had to cancel my ticket to the party, this made me sad. So this year I'll be there, dancing around like an idiot with some reindeer antlers on my head, mine sweeping bottles of beer from the tables... The significance of these moments is huge for me, however inconsequential the occasion, if it makes me feel alive, then it brings a great big smile to my face.  Each small life affirming moment like this is a poke in the eye to cancer, seeing as it's the party season, I've borrowed some lyrics from Elton! Kind of says it all...

Don't you know I'm still standing better than I ever did
Looking like a true survivor, feeling like a little kid.......

I'm still standing yeah yeah yeah
I'm still standing yeah yeah yeah

I've been so busy recently I've not had as much time as I'd like to keep writing the blogs, I love being busy, I love making plans.  I'm single, I don't have kids, I love spending time with my friends and family, travelling up and down the country, seeing people, staying over, staying out late, having a few drinks, eating nice food, going to concerts, exhibitions. This was what I missed most during treatment, your life goes on hold, you press pause for six months and resign yourself to missing out on things, I HATED missing out.  One of the first things I had to do after being diagnosed was cancel the flights I had booked to go to South Africa with my sister.  We had planned to go the following February but I would still be in the middle of chemo so a trip abroad was out of the question. (Although I did buy a fancy iPad with the money I got back...every cloud and all that).  What I felt before I started treatment was a kind of grief, a sadness for the life I thought I was leaving behind, this was one of the times when I felt my most sad and hopeless.  At this stage, there were still so many unknowns about treatment, you aren't sure exactly when you're going to come out the other side.

I've already written about how my surgery was a breeze, but the chemo exhausts you, physically and mentally, your brain is dulled, you lose motivation to even get dressed in the morning, everything in your life is dimmed or muffled.  It's hard to get joy from the things you used to love, I'd meet with friends and not have a lot to talk about except for treatment, side effects and even more treatment.  I didn't enjoy reading, or watching films, I felt like an outsider looking in at people getting on with their 'normal' lives.  You lose a lot of confidence, you look different, you feel different, you're worried that you might die.  Sometimes you spend hours just staring into space without the energy to do anything.  For me it was the side of treatment I least expected, that you lose a sense of who you used to be.  Being a cancer patient is your new identity, it's what takes over your diary and your brain.

So imagine the relief when it's finally all over, it starts small, because you still don't feel quite like your old self, but it happens slowly and gets better and better as the weeks go by.  After months of hardcore treatment and regular hospital visits you are more or less left to your own devices to pick up the pieces again, I wasn't sure how I was going to cope, so I just started making plans.  I was determined to get back to work as soon as I could, I work with some lovely people and I genuinely enjoy what I do.  I wanted to be normal, to drive in rush hour traffic, to be part of the real world again.  I had to have a chat with the occupational health nurse before I went back to work, she wasn't used to dealing with young people with cancer, I told her I had my surgery a month before and she was shocked, when I told her it was in April, she assumed I meant the previous year! I started off working just mornings for a couple of weeks and then started back full time.  I was two months post chemo and one month post op, this was quick but it felt right and in hindsight it was the best thing I ever did.  I wanted to put the past six months behind me as quickly as I could, and sometimes it all felt like it had happened to someone else.

I still had radiotherapy to tick off the list and this was more of an inconvenience than anything else. It required going to the hospital every weekday for four weeks to get zapped by a machine for five minutes, totally dull. They were nice enough to work some appointments around my social engagements....like my friend's hen weekend in Brighton, being in the middle of radiotherapy didn't stop me from dressing up as a mermaid and dancing in a nightclub until the small hours. Radiotherapy generally has pretty minor side effects, it can make you tired, but I never really noticed, compared to what I had experienced on chemo, this was so easy. So, on 19th August 2014 after 4 weeks of 'zapping' I was officially signed off from Oncology and they booked me in for an annual check up in 2015.

When you finish treatment and you're still in one piece it feels amazing, like you've dodged a bullet.  The feeling of relief is similar to when you have a bad dream that you wake up to realise isn't true.  You have 'that Friday feeling' every day of the week.  The old sayings are totally true, I have becoming a walking, talking cliche... I wake up every morning glad to be alive, feel the sun on my face and the wind in my (very short) hair.

If I could go back in time and visit the me from last year, who was just starting chemo and terrified, I would tell her that she's going to be OK actually and she's going to be a lot lot stronger than she ever thought she could be, and that it will finish sooner than she thinks and she's going to look back on it all and feel very proud of how she coped.

This is me moving on, watching Kasabian in Leicester in June with my lovely friend Hannah and in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago with Rich; my brother in law.  What a difference six months and some hair dye makes!!