Looking at the skies for
something, finding ducks and accepting help
With all other changes to myself,
my surroundings, my friends, my life; I do recall that May last year still felt
like May always had. It's always been my favourite month. And perhaps more a
splodge of ego than anything else winning me over- for it is my birthday month-
I do recall it felt the same as ever and that was wonderful as I don't even
feel like me anymore so why should May feel like my special month. May was
always a month of newness, freshness, colour, sunshine and an enormous dose of
shaking up and shaking off. But this year especially I had felt like a closed
oyster. Tight and tough, cross and yet well protected in my shell. I still
tried to occasionally walk a little way though since chemo stopped and even
whilst I was paying for it for a few days after, I tried to convince myself I
could build up my muscles and get outdoors again. The picture above was one of
those days. And what did I get rewarded with? A giant duck- what else?!
But bone mets don't work like
that. Muscle is connected to bone, bone is fragile and extra pressure on bone
is not recommended- at least by my oncologist and osteopath. I was saddened.
I'd taken so much pride in creating this ‘outdoorsy girl’ since my first brush
with cancer ten years ago. Go get some bloody hobbies I thought, get up out and
LIVE! Do what all the cancer positivity seems to be saying. And I did, I really
did. I ate well, got fit, got superfit, took some outdoorsy qualifications and
oomph I was off. I left my husband, found my first love and ‘did stuff’. I'd
never felt so free either and so able to express myself outside of an
increasingly dreadful work environment in FE. I had reinvented myself and I
quite liked her.
But now here I was. Am.
I'd thought about dying several
times. My first love left once it was clear what my life would be like. Or did
I push him away? It's possible but it's also possible I was protecting myself
for I knew he'd never care for me. His ego had got more enlarged in our lives
and he earned himself the nickname of Munchausens Matt due to his penchant for
hospital beds and doctors surgeries. It was scary.
I did a few cool things with
friends, some bucket list stuff which actually felt like a necessity back then
but I got increasingly tired and less able to manage some of my wonderful ideas
about what fun was (and it wasn't climbing up 127 steps to a sticky cottage in
Whitby- though once we'd got up or down that was pretty nice). I got some
complimentary holidays too from a couple of great charities and a fabulous
friend who's still leading the support at my rear and had great laughs with
family and friends. But it was so very tough and I began to realise that home
was where I was happiest and safest. And more comfortable!
But back to May. I'd recently
finished a long and arduous chemotherapy of docetaxel and I really did feel
dead inside. Body working but my spirit felt kicked around. What on earth was
living? Is this it? Can I choose my own way out of this? My heart was with my
children though and I felt like on reflection they kept me hanging on in there
like their smiling faces did for me ten years before whilst doing a similar
treatment. Primary cancer felt like there was a mountain to climb. And then get
off. In comparison Secondary felt like a plunge pool of gunk- never to get out
of or wash away . I felt so trapped and battered down. Is this it I kept
thinking? And then the book came.
How To Be Sick: A Buddhist
Inspired Guide For The Chronically Ill And Their Caregivers by Toni Bernhard.
The book came with me each morning to the bath. I would soak my sore and aching
bones until cool and then covering myself in a thin towel, take the book
quietly back to my bedroom. I didn't want to be ‘ chronically’ anything though.
I'd always tried to maintain a hard, tough ‘in-charge’ exterior and this wasn't
my idea of tough alpha girl material. And I didn't want to be sick. I wanted to
fight it to build it up to walk it off to shake it out. But I cowered inside
like a small thing and after a shaky start read and read and read this ‘bible’
of support and hand holding and spirit building and of courageous living. Toni
Bernhard gave me a promise of a ‘not too bad life’ and that felt better than
‘good enough’ it felt achievable and realistic.
“There is sickness here, but I am
not sick”; again she meditates, “There is sickness here but I am not sick”.
Perseverance wins as she realises after saying again, “Of course, there is
sickness in the body but I am not sick!”. What Bernhard described as both a
revelation and a source of great comfort was her discovering the Buddhist sense
of Annata, or an unfixed or unchanging self. A revolutionary departure from its
Hindu roots, the Buddha offers to the disciple a sense of a self which is
fluid, as she says “ an ever changing constellation of qualities” (p.38).
So here I was. Soaking to the
point of deep wrinkling. Osmosis occurring as my body offers its own water to
that of the bath. As pink and wrinkled as a newly born Aardvaark. I'm not sick.
