Tag: resilience

Act One

Today I am going to vacuum the house. It will be rewarding and will create a sense of achievement. I would like to do something small for the people who care for me on the daily. I will pop on a podcast and really immerse myself in the task. It will be an exercise in mindfulness. I will be distracted from my health for at least forty five minutes. Those shag rugs need a good going over thanks to our dog and that will get my heart rate up just enough to tip me into the medically recommended aerobic state to perfectly combat colorectal cancer proliferation.

Act Two

How the hell does the bag thingy attach to the inside of the drum? Hmm…this is trickier than I thought. Wait. Nope. Got it. Yep. Nailed it. Right. Power switch…is…quite low to the ground. No worries. I’ve got this. Ok. Start in the bathroom…least resistance. I’ll just stand here for a moment and get my breath…ok. How the hell does body hair get inside and behind the rolls of toilet paper?! (Drags everything out of the bathroom to ensure full floor coverage). Grunting. Heaving. Sighing. This is room one and I am basically dead. Is it just me or do pull along vacuum cleaners have the exact same propensity for getting stuck in a corner as Vegemite toast has for landing spread side down on the floor? Lots of yanking. Low level swearing. Gets. It. Done.

Right. Next. Parents room. The least they deserve is a vacc’d floor on return from the holiday house. Chuffed with self at satisfying vacuum lines created by my labour. “Look at this perfectly mown carpet with its parallel lines of detailed attention! Just something I threw into the morning routine because I’m a selfless, functioning human…” Fuck. The cord isn’t long enough to get around the other side of the bed without unplugging it from the low power switch out in the corridor which is about four metres away and may as well be a trek to base camp in Kathmandu. Fuckity fuck. Well…you can’t really see the dirty patch from the door because of the bed. It’ll be right. Ian barely walks over there anyway. Just into bed every night. It’ll be dark etc.

Act Three

Look. I know I’m only two rooms into this exercise but if I break it up into chunks throughout the day I’ve totally got this. I drag the vacuum back to our bedroom and the rate and intensity of swearing increases as the rolling barrel ploughs into every wall and corner on the way. Finally make it to the bedroom where the hose and its handle get stuck around the leg of a chair because I am now completely out of breath and puffing on hands and knees.

“FAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRKKKKKKKKKK!!!!!!! FUCK THIS SHIT!!!!!!!” I yell at the vacuum cleaner. I dramatically pull myself into standing and then with the flair of a losing contestant on RuPaul’s Drag Race in the final week elimination, I quite literally throw myself face down onto the bed. I am a six foot two, forty-seven year old arsehole having an actual, two year old, supermarket aisle, horizontal, hysterical tantrum (except I choose a softer surface because…experience).

Snot and tears stream from my face as Mel runs into the room thinking that I have been seriously injured. I incoherently garble a self-pitying tirade which, could be briefly summarised by, “Poor Me. My Life is Very Hard and Nobody Understands”. I wail at one point that the vacuuming incident is a mere metaphor for my life with cancer and my dwindling independence. I’m not sure Mel stays for the whole thing because at one point she hands me a tissue and I’m pretty sure I had accidentally vacuumed them all out of the box a few minutes earlier. She even, quite cruelly, I maintain, mentions that she had noticed I’d “missed a few bits”.

Awkward and extended pause.

Now comes the laughter. The giggling at how I have created a theatrical event out of a household chore and the ridiculousness of my attempt to draw parallels between the entirety of my current life challenges and vacuuming the carpet. The amusement that I thought I was EVER going to be able to vacuum the house and the knowledge that EVERYONE ELSE already knew where this was headed.

Mel finishes the vacuuming. I dust half the house and throw out some old receipts. Magro makes us all a coffee. The End.

It’s the day before treatment and all through the house, no-one should speak of it it, not even my spouse (to be). We all know that this topic is off limits until I start the active complaining stage. Until now I’ve been in the active denial stage.

It’s been almost three months since my last chemo infusion and a lot has happened in that time. For my liver. For my body. But not for my bowel cancer. Not a thing has been done about my bowel cancer in three months and I am increasingly aware that this now needs to be addressed. Sidenote: everyone needs a break from chemo at some stage. It is essential for both physical and mental recovery.

I’ve written and spoken so much about the bitter pill that is chemotherapy that it almost feels like straight-up whining. I keep coming back to the reconciliation of its cancer killingness against its poisonous nature. Don’t even get me started on the possibility of it no longer being able to kill the cancer. We’ve been down that path before and the concept of weeks of shitty treatment for no gain whatsoever just seems like unintentional cruelty.

A beautiful friend died last week. Out of the blue, she is gone. She was kind, generous, and full of love for her friends and family. She was one of the first people to learn of my diagnosis and has since described herself as my “loudest cheerleader”. We had spoken openly about my fears and treatment in such a way that would see us both tearful by the end of the conversation. It breaks my heart to think about that now. How naive we can be about these short lives we live.

Every bone in my body is screaming at me to avoid that fucking chair and drip tomorrow morning. But I will harness my friend’s silent cheers and get my sorry arse there tomorrow: rain, hail or vomit. I will turn up for treatment tomorrow because she didn’t even get the opportunity. And I will try and show up with grace and acceptance because it makes me feel resilient and empowered to do so.

“Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again.” Nelson Mandela

A few quick thoughts before I head off to chemo.

  1. Fuck this shit.
  2. I don’t want to.
  3. All of the above.

I’m in tears this morning at the thought of sitting in that (super comfortable) chair. I’ve been doing chemo for over seven months now in a relentless fortnightly cycle that quite literally keeps me alive. It keeps me alive whilst simultaneously giving the impression of slowly pulling my body apart, one membrane at a time.

Weird stuff starts to happen when you’ve been doing treatment for this long. Like Pavlov’s Dogs, one starts to respond before the needle has even gone in. My anxiety nausea started vaguely rocking my stomach yesterday and today my mouth is watering at the thought of the weirdness I’m about to experience.

Over the last few days more than twenty people have commented that I look good. Despite my hair being at that length our mums embraced in the eighties, I reckon they’re not lying. I look good…for having cancer. But in about eight hours time I am not going to be looking good. I’m going to be looking horizontal and I suspect large snot bubbles will develop as I cry myself into a deeper hole of self-pity.

My brand of resilience doesn’t look like someone putting on a brave face and showing up with a knowing smile on their face, grimly accepting all the harm is doing them good. My resilience looks like crying and being full of dread and worrying the port is going to get blocked again and trying to remember all the side effects I need to share with my oncologist and not flinching when they put the needles in and not clock watching as the hours tick by. These days its headphones on, blanket on, eye mask on and popping an Ativan to help me sleep through it. It’s two days with a pump coming out of my arm and into the belt around my waist and trying not to melt the connecting tube while I’m at the stove top. It’s losing my shit over dinner with friends in a crowded restaurant and telling them I’m not ready to die.

Two of my closest friends described me as a combination of dramatic and stoic. I fully understood the dramatic bit. I do love a bit of that. But I’d never thought of myself as stoic. But maybe I’d been thinking of stoic as the stiff jawed, back straight kind of emotionally blunted stoicism. I think my stoicism is the heart on the sleeve kind. I let everyone know how fucked up I feel about treatment, I let myself feel all the feelings, I cry during yoga, and then I SHOW UP AND GET THE FUCKING TREATMENT BECAUSE IT’S KEEPING ME ALIVE AND I HAVE NO CHOICE.

And then I feel like shit for four to five days. Less shit for another few days. Functional after that and then almost myself again on day 13. And then guess what…