My friends are
getting married & having babies & all I’ve got is Cancer. There are
days where I fail to remember what I've done, experienced & achieved in
life. The thanks I get when I take away someone's pain with the use of my hands
& sometimes psychotherapy skills. The fact that I worked my butt off at school
for an OP 1 & went from being a binge drinker to a professional triathlete. The
thing is I see Cancer as a weakness, as a failure of my body to fight off
mutating cells within it. It is my Achilles heel that I just can't seem to
shake. It persists in letting me know that no matter how positive, how 'strong'
(I appear to be) & how trusting I am in modern medicine that it still has
the upper hand over my life. It has bought me undone & made me brutally
aware of the vacancies in my life. The things I pretend to not care about but
are some of the few things I am dying to have. I want to either laugh in
the face of or slap the people that whine and whinge about their bad day at
work or how they hate their job yet don't do anything to change their
situation. There's always someone having a worse day than them. Like the person
who is told 'you have cancer' or 'treatment is ineffective' or 'you may lose
your voice or the function of your arm' or worse still ‘what you have is
terminal’.
How do you put into words the myriad of emotions experienced the past 19 months? I don't even know how to name some of the gut reaching, sleep steeling, hollowing feelings that have plagued me the past few months. Are they feelings and stages of grief? What have I lost? Time? Missed experiences? I still feel as though my life is rich with people, experience, my career and making sure I do things every day that makes me smile. With that has come the appreciation of all that I have and not the emptiness of what I have lost or don’t have.
How do you put into words the myriad of emotions experienced the past 19 months? I don't even know how to name some of the gut reaching, sleep steeling, hollowing feelings that have plagued me the past few months. Are they feelings and stages of grief? What have I lost? Time? Missed experiences? I still feel as though my life is rich with people, experience, my career and making sure I do things every day that makes me smile. With that has come the appreciation of all that I have and not the emptiness of what I have lost or don’t have.
For me, it was
supposed to be straight forward. Papillary carcinoma: the best cancer to have
they said. One surgery, one round of radio-active iodine (RAI) treatment and it
would likely be all over with. Then came the first recurrence. Another round of
RAI. Then another lymph node recurrence and then another lymph node recurrence.
Then being told my cancer was not taking up the radio-active iodine treatment.
That we are now hoping for a surgical cure. Clearly my papillary carcinoma is
not a good one to have.
I got to the point
about 12 months after diagnosis where I thought the worst was behind me that I
thought about it less and less. Now, once again, it is at the forefront of my
mind with. I had another 4 hour operation in September, only to find out a week
later that I still had lymph node disease in my neck. So
I had another 4 hour operation in December for more lymph node removal. I am
still counting every blessing as I could not be in better hands with the
surgeons, oncologist, specialists and medical staff overseeing my care. Aside
from an impressive scar, a large area of numbness over my neck, chest and upper
arm and some adhesion within my neck I have still come out relatively free of operative complications. I am still reminded daily that there’s something
sinister going on every time I move my head, neck and right arm. Sleep remains
and intermittent struggle when my pain gets out of control. These are some of
the frequent reminders that it is not over, that I’m not in the clear and
perhaps never will be.
No matter where you
run to in the world there is no way to escape the reality of your life. I ran
off to Thailand in November thinking it was exactly what I needed before facing
my 4th operation. All it did was highlight that; I was unable to
compete in a sport that I love and has become a huge part of my life, that my
body was struggling to stay healthy as I came down with a chest infection quite
quickly and that at the end of the day I was so violently lonely on so many
levels. I am that 30 year old loser that only has their parents to send them off
the potential life changing surgery. I suppose I should just be thankful to
have someone cares enough to be waiting on the other side of it. Additionally
the other side of major neck surgery isn’t pretty and I’m not sure who else I
would want to see me that way anyway.
Now is not the time
to be actively looking for someone. I had a friend ask me about the dating
scene a few weeks ago and it’s quite possibly the last thing on my current to
do list. How do you meet someone
during this time in my life? I have only just returned to work & have
started some light exercise. I have put on weight, feel self-conscious and am
running low on self-esteem. Not to mention a very obvious 20cm neck incision
which is quite hard to conceal unless I wear a turtle neck jumper or scarf
& in summer and that’s just weird. So how do you sit there and tell someone
you’ve just met ‘I am currently going through cancer’. That’s just plain
fucked. And scary. Most people don’t know what to say or how to then talk to me
at all after I tell them. You can see the shock on their face but for me it is
now a daily component to my life. Then come the pity statements that I am just
about done with;
‘Be strong.’ What
other choice do I have?
‘You’ll get through
this.’ How do you know? Cancer kills people every day, what makes me any different?
‘Have you thought
about…….’ Insert some load of rubbish people read on the internet or hear about
with absolutely no idea what cancer I have, where it is in my body, what is the
evidence based treatment of choice is and how it will interact with my current
treatment and medications? I used to smile politely and nod when people tried
to offer me ‘alternative therapies’, now however I pull them up on their
uneducated advice. If they have the 'miracle cure' to my Cancer why don't they
think that my specialists who have been in the field for 20 years & longer
wouldn't be suggesting some exotic fruit or cannabis oil as the answer to all
my problems? Failed treatment of their patients only reflects badly on them. I
am a scientist by heart. It is why I have gone down & will continue on the
conservative modern medicine track.
Sometimes I think I
should write a manual of ‘what not to say to someone with cancer’. People who
are ignorant and inexperienced in what it's like to have and go through Cancer
are the first it seems, to offer their 2 cents worth. To me, this has only lead
to more anger, frustration, anxiety & tears.
On a positive note
it has also lead me to effectively narrow down those who I actually keep close
and confine in. There is the heartbreaking element of the realisation that
certain people I thought were close friends are in fact just mere
acquaintances. Overwhelming is the discovery of some people in my life I may
have previously overlooked as true treasures and are the first to offer me
lifts to appointments, home cooked meals and checked in with me daily to see
how I am coping.
Crying and tears
are a waste of energy. It is however a normal process in relation to going
through cancer. It can still hit me at the most inappropriate of times where
the weight of the matter is crushing and emotions will stream from my eyes
uncontrollably. I have slowly begun to crack. I’ve slipped in and out of the
desire to fight this. I have moments of feeling like I am giving up on myself
and giving up on the fight, some days it’s just all too hard. I have been so
incredibly strong and flippant in the face of cancer, but think it has just taken
me a long time for the emotional backlash to really hit me hard. I have cried a
lot. Sometimes so much that I didn’t think it would ever stop. The 45 minutes
before my surgery in December, I thought I was going to drown in my tears in
the horrible little waiting bay prior to going into theatre.
I grieve for the
normality of getting up to training for a couple of hours before a full day of
work at the clinic followed by another hour of exercise at the end of the day.
I miss feeling strong, fit and healthy which I managed to regain after my 2013
battle. I am sad for the realisation that some friendships obviously meant more
to me than it did to the other person.
I am accepting now
that it is also perfectly fine to admit that I am bloody pissed off that this
has happened to me. I’m pissed off that my health has regressed multiple times
over the past 18 months. I am fuming when I see groups of young adults smoking
outside of offices. It makes me so angry that people really take for granted
just how lucky they are to have their health. I am angry at my inability to ask
for help when I desperately need it. I am raging at the fact that I look healthy when this bloody cancer
continues to internally sabotage my body in ways that I don’t understand. That
my appearance of health, makes some ignorant people think that I’m over it when
I feel more in limbo than ever before. I am frustrated that there isn’t some
miracle cure that will get on top of my stubborn malignancy.
But at the end of
the day I’m downright scared and have been for the past year and a half. Scared
of everything that is now past history. I was terrified by the surgeries and
potential complications that I was facing each time they cut my neck open.
Would my voice change? Would I lose it? Would I have lymhoedema? Would I have
breathing and swallowing difficulties? Would returning to sport & work be
an option? Would this cancer potentially kill me? I am still scared about what
the future holds. Scared about the suspicious deposit that sits behind my
sternum that hasn’t been addressed, the potential of it coming back again and
spreading beyond the point of medical control. I’m scared I that I may die.
I am also a little
bit frightened of the person I have become. Mainly because I have never been as
blunt and as honest as I am now. For that I know I may lose some so-called
friends. Life really is too short to be hiding emotions & being tolerant of
those who are draining, pull you down and waste your energy.
So I will live. I
have booked a month in South America for later this year with a friend. I will
work towards lights at the end of my current tunnel. Whether that be; travel,
adventures with friends or returning to triathlon in some capacity. I realised
the past couple of weeks that in regards to triathlon, I’m not done yet. So I will
work towards competing again in the coming months, regardless of what still may
lurk in my body. I cannot live in the ‘what ifs’. But if I don’t, so be it.
People do move on from past life times, even if this throws you into a feeling
of disorientation. As long as it sees me healthy and surrounded by those I love
then that’s not really so bad at all.
Rachie xo