Ep.46: Bored with this now

I’ve been quiet for a few weeks. Struggling to write. Until this point the words have just poured out but just now, I can't quite work out how to wrestle what I need to say onto the page, and I suspect the problem is this.

I’m really, really bored of cancer. I’m SO over cancer, it’s not true. I desperately want to draw a line and move on now, but I can’t.

I had told myself that once I reached the anniversary of my diagnosis (today, 22nd January as it happens) I would call it a day. Not ‘it’ as in end it all ffs, no, end this, the blog. I’d envisaged writing a breezily up-beat post about my skipping off into the sunset with my wetsuit to get married and bring up my daughter and maybe have some chickens and make beeswax candles (David has bought beehives, don’t start me!) and grow potatoes, all that Good Life idyllic get-me-and-my-perfect-life pish (it wouldn’t be pish, it would be wonderful, but no one has a perfect life, no one).  

Basically, what I wanted to do was stick a very large middle finger up to cancer and say, ‘fuck you, you’re gone, we won, eat my smiley faced emogie!’

I’ve been dutifully paused, pen in hand, waiting to write that post, to wrap it all up, but I can’t. I considered whether I’d simply lost the ability to write, that all this blog has been was a temporary fix in a time of need.

The reason I can’t skip off into the sunset to pick daisies and swim with the dolphins is I can’t skip. Literally. Some days I struggle to get out of bed I’m so stiff. I shuffle around like a 90-year-old. I can’t sit for too long or my body sets like fast drying cement and I have to crowbar myself up right and oil my joints so I can function again.  If I try to turn around to look behind me it’s like I’m wringing out an iron bar.  There’s no give or twist.  Solid.  And why am I like this? Because I made the flipping terrible decision to have a reconstruction after my mastectomy. I keep circling round that choice, trying to revisit and remember how I ended up here.  Of course, none of us knew my body would fight this business of being rearranged so aggressively but it has, and it is and as a result I can’t leave cancer behind because I can’t escape the ongoing impact of my surgery.

I actually fantasize about going back in time and asking for ‘just a mastectomy please’. I do. In my wilder moments I’ve even envisaged asking for a double mastectomy so I can be rid of the lot (I don’t need them and imagine how much easier the bra thing would be!). I have a friend who did just that, demanded the double and got it, how I envy that bold brave choice now. I’ve thought about camping out at the breast clinic, begging to have it all reversed somehow (the scar tissue would be even worse I’m told, I did actually ask my physio).

I heard a question asked on a radio comedy programme the other week, ‘what’s the worst decision you’ve ever made?’ and it was out of my mouth before the question mark had finished hanging.  My reconstruction, easily, that’s how big this is.

I see people wrestle with it, confused, when I say I’ve been encased in concrete. They sometimes still try to reach for the stock phrase ‘it’s early days’ but it isn’t flipping early days, it’s been nearly 11 months since my op. I also regularly get handed the singularly unhelpful ‘listen to your body’ bull. Trust me, I listen so fucking hard I’m now deaf with the tinnitus.  Most days my body roars at me.

I’m not in pain. I think folk find that confusing too. If I’m not in pain, what am I fussing about. But I can’t describe it any better than I have already. I’ve been buried alive and each day I have to chip my way out of the tomb to function sort of normally.

So, I do what I can. I pay for physio every week (lucky me that I can afford it, imagine going through this shit with only the NHS to look to for support, especially just now), I diligently go to online pilates which makes me feel I’m ripping my body in two – so much so most classes make me cry with frustration (sorry Claire I know you won’t want to know this when you read it, but its true). I’ve started climbing on the turbo trainer several times a week, just in case my body will let me cycle in the near future, so I’m ready. I walk, alot.  I try to swim but I’m like a bird with a broken wing and the water is fecking freezing just now! And when I’m not doing all that I’m starting up a new business, I’m trying to support B through home school, I cook, clean, I’ve even started learning how to measure and quote for bathrooms so I can take some pressure of David’s ridiculous workload AND now the vet has told me I need to clean Henrik's teeth everyday. Yes, on top of all of this, I brush my cat's teeth. 

I am trying to get better and move on, I’m trying to get past this period of my life but there is no denying it, while I maybe bored sense-less with banging on about cancer, the whole point about this blog was to be honest and tell the truth.   My truth is the physical impact is still here and huge and it follows me round all day every day.  To pretend it isn’t would be a lie. So that’s why I’ve sat in silence, I’ve been sitting here fuming that I can’t run away from this thing, fuming that I’m banging the same drum, fuming that I can’t write that happily ever after.  Not quite yet at any rate.