More than just eyebrows.

Love in small gestures

Let’s be honest - there is something about a face that just looks bloody weird without eyebrows. Women lead the charge for ‘eyebrow appreciation’ as they basically act as a photo frame for the rest of our face.  There is so much attention on shaping, tinting, feathering, and waxing, that we have no doubt failed to remember the pure functionality of eyebrows. As someone getting back into an exercise regime (without eyebrows), I now have an abundance of appreciation for why I actually need them: to stop sweat from running straight down my face!  

But it has become more than that when trying to reconcile the weirdness in the mirror – thankfully I’m a fair-haired creature, so an absence of eyebrows and eyelashes hasn’t been as much of a shock compared to what my brunette cousins must experience. And for men as well. Nonetheless, there is something missing in more ways than the obvious. So in an attempt to look (and feel) more ‘normal’, I ordered fake eyebrows (called ‘eyebrow wigs’ … who knew !?). They are made of human hair and are stuck to some adhesive thingy already in the loose shape of an arch that are supposed to just get glued to your face. Sounds so simple! Weird. But simple.  It was therefore a surprise to me when the moment came to inch my foot through the door of ‘normal’ and apply said fake eyebrows, that I instead started crying in front of the bathroom mirror. With one half-stuck half-cocked eyebrow. Had it really come to this? That in some desperate attempt to look and feel more like me, I was sticking someone else’s hair to my face? And that those, plus a fake fringe, would fool everyone else (well, more like fool me) into thinking that I was regaining some semblance of self-confidence.

I was wrong. This was about so much more than eyebrows. This was about finding acceptance and recognition in a face that looked anything but familiar. And it was joining a long line of reasons about why cancer brings about so many reasons to ask questions without easy answers.

It also became about recognising love in small gestures. When my beloved walked into the bathroom to find me in this teary state, he looked perplexed. And not just because I had a half-applied eyebrow hovering somewhere on my forehead! I couldn’t get the first one to line up properly and didn’t even want to try the second. But he just took the glue stick from my hand, peeled off the eyebrow, and said “Let me”.

And there it is. The myriad of ways that people need people is beyond definition. It comes in any small gesture that just says: “I’m thinking of you in among all the chaos of whatever else is going on in my life right now”.  When someone passes away, or something devastating happens in a friend’s life (like hearing “Jodie’s got cancer”), people confess to not having made contact because “I just don’t know what to say”.  That is ultimately about them.  The opportunity for connection, for humanness, has been lost. Because it’s actually about the other person and what they need. And for the record, we don’t all need grandiose statements and offerings, because those start to look and feel as if they are about some publicly recognised act of giving for the ‘giver’, as opposed to the gift of simply caring. Of acknowledging that you can’t offer an answer to fix whatever the problem is, or to provide some profound life meaning that will make all the bad news wash away. It’s just about being present. Listening. Connecting. Saying “You matter”. And sometimes it’s just about helping to stick fake eyebrows onto a teary face that otherwise says, “I love you”.

Labels and limitations.

Finding courage in connections

“So, what do you do?”

I used to define myself by the response to that question. My title. My status. My list of achievements. Me having a good day/a good life was dictated by whether I was rock-starring it at work. Mostly because I didn’t really exist outside of work. I was so wrapped up in all the ‘other’ important stuff that I simply didn’t have time to, or know how to, have a conversation with myself about what I actually wanted to do with my life.  

Now that I’m on an extended break from work, I have to dig a little deeper when answering that question from someone I’ve just met. I almost start to apologise for the misunderstanding – that I don’t have a job at the moment, so am suddenly unqualified to answer the question.  Then I start to say something about recovering from cancer treatment, but that seems all wrong too. I don’t want to be defined by a disease any more than I want to be defined by a job title. I am so much more than that. But it got me thinking about whether it’s time to dream up something a bit bigger and believe it.

I was out with a friend once who managed to convince a guy that her job was grading the St Kilda beach in Melbourne at dawn to make sure all the drug syringes had been picked up before the morning swimmers were out and about. She even went so far as to describe how the indented lines in the sand were formed. I stood there, equally as shocked and impressed as the guy asking the question, but only because she was so damn convincing! Mind you, she was a 6ft sassy glamazon woman, so she could have said she was one of Santa’s elves and I’m sure he still would have believed her… but the fact remained, at that moment, she had painted a picture of doing something completely UN-believable, and yet had such conviction, EVEN I nearly bought it! 

What she could have said was “I’m a [insert label here]” and he would have nodded and imposed his own assumptions about her label, and then said “Oh, well I’m a [insert next label here]”.  And she would have likely done the same. Then there just would have been copious amounts of more nodding to fill awkward silences and more assumptions, and eventually someone would have run to the safe haven of the bartender.

We start by wanting to get to know who someone is but instead seem to focus on what they do. The real shocker is that we do it to ourselves just as much – instead of asking ourselves what we have to offer, we define our worth by what we do: our title.

Labels only lead to limitations. We forget that life is about so much more. It’s about our capacity to love. To accept. To connect. To understand. To share with. To learn about. Those are the real qualities we offer as humans.

So when meeting someone new, what if we ditch the old “So, what do you do?” (and the cheat sheet list of assumptions) and instead try something else…What do you believe in? What did you dream about as a kid? What do you dream about now? If you could change the world, what would it be? Do you sing in the shower? What’s your favourite way to spend a rainy Sunday? 

What if we asked ourselves the same questions. Answering may not be easy, or maybe they should be.

One of best things I’ve done is made new friends that don’t have the last 5 or 10 or 20 years of baggage to throw at me when I say I can’t do something. Or when I say I want to do something different. Like water colour painting. All I hear is “But you can’t paint!” from those that ‘know me’. It echoes my own thoughts “Oh yeah, that’s right, I’m not creative“.  I’ve not picked up a paint brush since year 6 art class. But you know what, I was wrong. And so were all those people who supposedly knew me for the last however many years. Apparently, I AM creative. I just needed some belief and opportunity and the blank slate offered by someone new. The art teacher didn’t say “How many people can paint?” she said, “How many people want to give it a crack?”.

The only limitations you will encounter are those you impose on yourself. This was the advice I used to give young grads coming through the workplace. “I can’t” vs “I can”.  There’s only a one letter difference there, but it creates a lifetime of whether choices are granted or taken away.

As children, we all get given one gift – to dream. As adults, we all get given the additional gift of making decisions. They’re not mutually exclusive, but yet we treat dreams like Santa or the Easter bunny – they eventually get erased or forgotten with ‘growing up’.

Limitations and boundaries will always have a place in our lives… it’s called a coffin.

So in the meantime, my own response to the ‘what do you do’ question, should anyone ask me, will be something like: “I dream big. Walk proud. Breathe free. Live gratefully.”

Chemo: Friend, not Foe.

Embracing the fear of chemotherapy

Last time I checked, the number 1 fear for most people was public speaking, but I would make a calculated guess that number 2 would be chemotherapy. I can only relate it to the fear of the dark I had as a kid – I didn’t know what monsters might be lurking under my bed or around a dark corner. And until I could muster the courage to turn a light on, my childhood mind continued to be convinced that whatever may be waiting for me was intending to do me harm.

Chemo had the same effect on my adult mind leading up to my first round.  In my working life, I had mastered the art of treading water in a sea of information-overload with data analysis, projections, and evidence-based recommendations. Following my cancer diagnosis, I tried to do the same thing. From reading all the information booklets about chemotherapy, talking to medical staff, taking a ‘sensible’ approach with the Google search button, to listening to other people who had been through chemo, or knew someone who had been through chemo. And yet at the end, I was left scrambling around unable to find a light switch in the dark scary world of The Unknown.  The only fact I knew was that my hair would eventually fall out. Everything else was as scientific as guessing how many jelly beans were in a jar. 

The most comforting reflection I received from a dear friend was that the fear of what might happen is nothing compared to what actually does happen.  Our brains, after all, are hard-wired to fill in missing pieces of a story. They love to speculate, to imagine as many possible scenarios as we give space for, and to ultimately allow our deepest fears to wreak havoc during what otherwise feels like a car crash in slow motion.  So, I decided to make good use of all the information and stories I had collected and created a chemo shopping list (otherwise known as my ‘just in case’ list). I added everything from black nail polish and a chair for the shower through to a wig and cold press juicer. 

It was while I was methodically cleaning out my bathroom cupboard the day before my first treatment that my newly-claimed stoicism began unraveling. Strangely enough, it wasn’t the light-hearted jokes about not needing hair styling products for the next two years. Rather, it was finding the salt and bicarb soda purchases from my chemo shopping spree and realising I had no idea what the answer was to a seemingly innocuous question: whether to start mouth rinses that first night, or just wait and see if I developed mouth ulcers. And so I sat on the bathroom floor and cried.  

It was a timely reminder that regardless of how much planning and preparation I had done to that point, I still didn’t have the answers. All I could do was choose to be ok with ‘just in case’.  I didn’t know how many of the 20+ potential side-effects I would experience or to what degree. But then I found a packet of an old antibiotics script and saw that those too had a list of 20+ potential side effects, some similar to chemo, and yet I never thought twice about taking them because I viewed those drugs as medicine. 

And there it was – the one resounding fact in all of this: whether I thought I would get through it, or not get through it, both scenarios were right. It came down to how I viewed my chemo treatment: as a friend or a foe. I chose friend. I embraced it as a much-needed respite from being stuck inside a hamster wheel since diagnosis – the futile frantic pace of running in one spot not going anywhere. That’s how it feels. The five surgeries/procedures in six weeks, follow ups with surgeons, oncologists, radiation oncologists, physiotherapists, exercise physiologists, CT scans, bone scans, colonoscopies, pap smears, dental chairs. And still no god damn apple pie on the hospital dinner menu! Chemo was now about slowing down, catching my breath, and trying to process all that had happened.

Despite pulling myself back together the night before, I woke up with what I could only imagine would be similar feelings for someone walking a tight-rope between two skyscrapers. Completely pumped up with confidence from all the preparation and planning, but yet breathless with self-doubt about whether I tied the ends of the rope correctly.  All the sanity and comfort of the chemo shopping spree had flown out of my mental window while I was driving to the hospital.

Walking into the waiting area of the chemo clinic, I imagined putting on a new pair of glasses. I looked around and saw faces of support from a community that I didn’t even need to meet, rather than those of other cancer patients. I saw smiles on the faces of each nurse invested in my care, rather than those of clinical staff in a hospital just doing their job. I saw bags of medicine hanging from an IV stand intending to save my life, rather than toxic drugs intending to cause me harm. So the casual conversation with the nurses, the reciprocated smile on my face, the tea and biccies trolley, the quiet time to read and refocus my thoughts, making jokes about red cordial in the IV drip, all became part of a silent dialogue on repeat: I am ok. I will be ok.   

A few hours after coming home, I felt anything BUT ok. I was wired. In fact, I was contemplating a stand-up comedy career.  All I could feel was a bang bang bang inside my head. Jumbled garbage coming out of my mouth. Twitches and ticks from my hands. Talking 200 km/hr.  It was like going to bed with a ticking time bomb. But it wasn’t the chemo – it was the steroids.

To get to sleep that night, it took 10 deep breaths. And a sedative. I put my hand to my chest and heard my heart beating again. It was a reminder to change the dialogue: There is life saving medication flowing through my veins, not poison. I repeated two words in my head to the sound of every heart beat: In. Out. This was not the time to check out of The Unknown and roll over into Freak-out World.  And I learned a valuable lesson – take the sedatives early on treatment night and go to bed!

In the end, I embraced the dark. I chose to trust that my feet would continue to move one foot in front of the other, that my outstretched arms would prevent me from face-planting into a wall (or a monster), and that whatever may be out there around the corner could just as easily sit with me rather than chase after me.   

I've included more about how I prepared for chemo and have managed my treatment in my learnings page, Planning for 'just in case'.  

A version of this blog also appears on patient blogs for Icon Cancer Centre and Starts at 60.