Three-headed goats.

Listening to our own song lyrics

There I was, banging out the lyrics to one of Australia’s iconic songs, ‘Cheap Wine’ by Jimmy Barnes, alongside some friends one night. For those of you unfamiliar with it, it goes something like “Cheap wine and a three da-aayy growth”. But I stopped half way through the chorus when I heard my friends’ pants-wetting laughter at MY version of the lyrics that instead went: “Cheap wine and a three-headed goat”.

Ok, ok, laugh if you must. I have to admit, in between the heckling, I was also close to falling over in the street, with tears streaming down my face, at what is clearly a ludicrous version of a song lyric. But it was one that I had been repeating for at least 15-20 years in countless bars and pubs (I mean, who can honestly understand what Barnesy is screeching about at the best of times!?).

Then there came Sade’s “Smooth Operator”, or as I have historically preferred to sing, “Oooh Carburetor” (as in a car engine. Yes. I think I have paid unnecessary homage to my inner rev-head over the years. And may need my hearing checked).

We all hear accurately because it's coming from our own ears. We think we are hearing the right words as they are spoken... But then someone points out there are different words. So we listen again... And sure enough, when I listen to that Jimmy Barnes song now, I can clearly hear those OTHER (accurate) words, not my previous long-standing (very funny but very inaccurate) version.

An extension of this is hearing what others say, or what we say to ourselves. We hear what we want to; what we believe to be true. But we must always be prepared to be told there's another version of truth. There's another perspective. Sometimes we just need someone else to offer up new words and convince us to lean in and listen a little harder.

There are always going to messages we hear that say: ‘I’m not good enough. I’m not worthy. I can't’. The song is playing, and the lyrics (so we think) are clear and accurate. But if we take another listen, and adjust the tone, we might just instead start to hear: ‘I deserve it. I am worthy. I can’.

Conquering change.

What it really meant to finish chemo

“I conquered this moment”. That’s the sign on the wall of the chemo clinic above a big brass bell to represent whatever people need it to represent. Most of the time, the ringing of the bell is about celebrating the last chemo session ... But for me on my last day recently, it felt more like an apology than a party. Like I should have been standing at a private wake rather than a public celebration. There was an applause and cheer from the nurses and even the patients. But I just went back to my hospital chair and cried quietly while I packed up my bag and walked away. 

I thought I'd feel elated, excited, proud. I thought I'd be breaking out the Hawaiian shirts and pina coladas and balloons. That the only heaviness I'd feel would be from the world boxing champ belt that I would have otherwise been wearing after going 12 rounds with chemo. But the heaviness was on my heart (and my backside from the weight I've put on in the last few months). 

I did feel proud that I had come through all of this (relatively) in one piece, but I realised it was much more than finishing chemo. 'This' was really about the last six months since diagnosis when my world decided to flip on its own axis.  I was also just unsurprised by it all... Did I ever give myself permission NOT to get through it? Was there ever any other choice I offered myself? Well, yes there was. I could have put on the pink boxing gloves and taken this all on as a fight. I could have pushed back in denial. I could have allowed myself to become victim to my anxiety about all the things that could go wrong. 

But I didn't. I surrendered to it all with the perspective of treatment, not toxins. I surrendered to the facts like I would lose my hair and that I would have some really crappy days. What I also did was trust. I trusted that there were medical experts who deal with people like me every single day.

I also trusted myself. I have come to realise the hard way that the strongest and most reliable friend I had in all of this was me. And when I say me, I really mean my mind. The messages I tell myself. The choices I make for myself. The decisions I commit to that are about looking after me. Sometimes those decisions and choices have been to shut out the noise of the "should" list and instead spend a morning in my linen cupboard throwing everything on the floor and creating a new colour-coordinated Tower of Towels. And sheets. And cushion covers. And crap I didn't even know was in there (And who can really make those damn fitted sheets have square edges!?). Sometimes it's not answering a phone call because I'm simply too tired/brain-fried/wired to try and string two words together. 

I couldn't tell you what I've done in the last six months. Sometimes it feels like its been one continuous day. People keep asking me though so I've started to think a bit more about a better way to answer it other than coordinating linen cupboards and binge watching house renovation TV shows. 

What I've done is lived. And the last six months is really just a snap shot in time of a life. A life that could belong to anyone. I've done whatever I've had to do to survive. And I don't mean from a life/death perspective (even though it's in the context of a life-threatening disease). I mean to survive each day by nurturing myself enough or asking for help enough to know I can get up the next day. 

I have grieved so many things - lost plans, lost opportunities, lost choices, lost identity, and lost confidence. 
I have persevered with love and compassion in the face of bitter brutal disappointment from people closest to me who were never supposed to know how to deliver such blows. 
I have suffered pain, fear, hurt, anxiety, sadness, grief, anger. 
I have surrendered, fallen over, laid down naked, and not gotten up. 

But I've also received with absolute clarity the gifts of trust. Of kindness. Forgiveness. Openness. Vulnerability. Hope. Love. Laughter. Courage. 

I have honoured myself, my life, and the choices I’ve made.

I have embraced all the unknowns and all the choices I still have in front of me.

I have heard quiet for the first time in a long time. 

I have given myself permission to shred the Should list(s) and replace them with Today I think I feel like...lists. 

And above all else I have evolved. I have changed. Pain had gifted me that.

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.”

Beyond the art of bald head maintenance.

Embracing the opportunity to start again  

Who knew the words: “Can adults get cradle cap?” would ever leave my lips.

Who knew there was such a thing in Google’s search results as ‘bald head maintenance’!? Apparently my chemo-inspired nudie noggin’ requires the same love and attention to that of a new born baby.

But dealing with the fallout (pardon the pun) of chemotherapy has raised a few questions that go far beyond an absence of hair.  

Cancer, despite being a life-threatening illness, seems to strip us back to the day we were born – when we came into this world free of self-imposed limitations or others’ expectations (or hair). It's now both liberating and yet bordering on debilitating to feel the freedom of a new beginning… Maybe that’s why we are born screaming – overwhelmed with the power of breathing in life, but also the fear of what and who we may become. Or not become.

Who are we when we stand naked, alone, no hair, no labels, no presumptions, and no clue about what happens next?  

Losing one’s hair brings with it a physical confrontation, because it’s a critical part of our exo-skeleton; our body armour. It’s how we identify ourselves, and how others, unintentionally or otherwise, place a value on us.  Not many would seek an opportunity in our adult lives to rip off the suit of armour we spend years building and reinforcing. But without one, I’m asking the question now, to what end did I fight so furiously to uphold mine over all these years? To protect myself on the inside from hurt, pain, failure, or fear? To give out some external representation of status or success; confidence or identity? Underneath the clothes and hair, regardless of the brand names and colour/style, we’re all the same.  We think and act in ways that try to protect our hearts from feeling anything but rejected, unwanted, unloved, or alone in this world.

And that brings me to the other question, which is almost a spiritual confrontation. There’s an honesty that comes with being stripped bare. It’s an unapologetic honesty because the body armour has been removed completely, and what’s left underneath is, by nature, vulnerable and raw and unprotected. And yet this is probably the strongest version of myself I’ve ever known.  

Why then, without cancer or chemo or complete hair loss, and with access to a full suit of body armour, did I used to find it so hard to be unapologetically honest with the simplest of truths: You hurt me. I’m scared. I think I love you. I need your hand. 

I will need to rebuild some kind of exo-skeleton again, because I won’t be existing in this cancer treatment bubble forever. But I will make sure that it does not have electrified razor wire this time, or an emergency eject button if I’m having a bad hair day. I now trust that my greatest strengths remain on the inside; borne from vulnerability and a voice that speaks my truths.

Life vs. Lines.

The gift of getting old

I’ve never been to the Grand Canyon, but yet I’ve referenced seeing it every day in the mirror for the last 10 years. It’s a massive fault line that runs between my eyebrows (well, used to, back in the day when I had eyebrows!).

I was contemplating a doozy of a birthday-present-to-self last year … Botox. I was being very sensible about it, not wanting to go overboard with the extras like fillers and collagen that would have me resembling something from the X-Files. Just a little bit (famous last words no doubt).

But I chickened out.

And then the strangest thing happened - I got cancer and that Grand Canyon on my face seemed to disappear.

It’s ok, there’s no hidden side effect from chemo that includes creating wrinkle free zones (although the puffy face from the steroids does help fill in the cracks !). It’s because you see what you focus on. The difference in my face is that I no longer focus on it, therefore I don’t see it.  Now my focus has shifted to how many eyelashes I still have left. But I tell you what, my blue eyes seem to stand out a lot more these days!

Lines are experiences, good and bad. A life lived. Loves. Losses. Lessons learned.

For me, that Grand Canyon line used to be just the physical manifestation of a life full of stress/frowning/worrying/thinking too hard about too many things.

But that line is now a proud Harry Potter-style face stamp of accomplishing great things in extreme circumstances in my life. Like living interstate away from my family from the age of 17. Like spending nearly 10 years working while I was trying to complete two university degrees. Like drowning in tears from broken hearts, that were once also great loves. Like busting through 2000 applicants to get my dream job in the criminal justice system when I finally graduated. Like driving through regional Victorian communities devastated by the Black Saturday bushfires, crying silently in sympathy every time I drove those roads or listened to a grieving parent or school principal about children and families that didn’t survive, and asking what I could do to help them. Like bearing witness to the horrors of humanity through child sex abuse, rape, domestic violence, and murder, and carving out a career that would allow me to help them too.

Those stories and faces were the reasons why I worked so damn hard. And now my stress line is my badge of honour. They are reminders that I’ve been a part of greatness. Of great change. That I’ve been around the block a few times. That I have perspectives that I can share through experiences. That I have survived near-drowning in emotions that have shaped my capacity to love, to feel, to fold. And there’s the lines around my eyes and cheeks. Those are from the happiness and the joy every time I’ve giggled or nearly wet my pants laughing from some ridiculous story or movie or joke shared among friends.

So why then would I now set out and erase all of that? (Spoiler alert: I won’t be).

Why do others then? Is it because people don’t want to wear their emotions for others to see? Or to attempt to not feel them at all? To be frozen, emotionless.

In other cultures, lines/wrinkles are a sign of respect, an honour bestowed upon others through experience. It’s wisdom through living. Fears. Failures. Wins.

If all you choose to see are the flaws, that's all you'll ever see. If the concern is that you'll end up on the single shopping shelf without erasing them (in some attempt to look 10 years younger), well, maybe you need to re-think the quality of the potential buyer … And maybe you should also reconsider what your lines represent to you. If there’s only pain, sure, go for the needle or the knife. But remember that there are those who will instead only see the mother of their children. The love of their life. The future potential of a life long partner. A soul connection. 

Growing old is a gift that not everyone receives. And yet we tend to fear it and wish it would go and visit someone else. What we forget is that it is a privilege to age, not a punishment.

Now, where others choose to focus on lines or wrinkles, I see life.

And so it’s Happy Birthday to me … this week I’m 41 years young.

Surrender builds resilience.

Looking after yourself above anyone else

I hate the word resilience. It’s everywhere now – kids need it, adults need it, we apparently need it at work, home, the gym, even the garden plants need it!

There’s an expectation that you can do a course on resiliency and then “HEY PRESTO” you’re a resilient creature ready to face battle.

For me, resiliency is a factor of who we are at the core of our being that says you can do more when you least want to, and when others least expect you to. Testing my resiliency for me has felt like being slammed in the guts with a railway sleeper - doubled over in pain, barely able to breath, and then a car runs into the back of me and takes my legs out. And while I’m lying on the ground in the fetal position, a bird flies past and shits on my head (that has happened by the way – the bird part).

The end part, the ‘results-driven’ part of the resiliency test is whether I can, and want to, get up. Or whether I instead choose to lie there until someone picks me up and carries me to the nearest doctor. Ultimately it comes down to choice. It’s not something that can be taught because it depends on who and what and when. Some people don’t want to get up unassisted because it takes more resolve, strength, and belief than they have in them at that given point in time. And that’s ok. There are times when I have battled within my own mind about whether I need a crane to pick up my zombie-fied existence and dump me back in the fetal position in the comfort of my own bed. And trust me, I have been there. Not within this cancer diagnosis, but a time not so long ago that serves as a constant reminder that at one point in my life, I gave in. Because I needed to.

There is something powerful about surrender. It’s about accepting that sometimes stuff feels a bit bigger than just you. While I would have got an A for Acceptance, the resiliency test score would have come up with a big fat F for Fail. But yet I see it as one of my greatest accomplishments. The fact that I did collapse, I allowed myself to stay down for the count when the TKO was declared, and at some point when I felt I could trust my body to lift my limbs, and my belief in my gut that I could move my legs forward, I got up.  It’s a critical part of my story and how I ended up where I am right now. My ability now is to take all that has come my way and wrap it up in a pledge to find where this path may lead, because I clearly didn’t get the message from my previous time in Life’s boxing ring.

What I did learn was that resiliency comes from within. From experience. From belief. And ultimately from the choice we make on a particular day. My choice for today is to get up.  My choice for tomorrow is to believe that I can and will get up. And if I can’t, my choice is to nurture and trust that my body is getting exactly what it needs… rest. So that the next day, I can start again. 

A serve of self-love (with a side of coffee).

Support can come from the most surprising places

Self-love lessons can appear at any time, assuming we’re open to it. For me, a stand out was the day that my beloved local barista, Michael, invited me around to the other side of the coffee counter to do a baldie selfie (me, newly follicly-challenged; Mike, a result of the natural course of men aging gracefully!). I had not ventured outside once with my new chemo-do. And other than the occasional hot flush/fever at home, I rarely walked around with my noggin doing a nudie run. But this day, I was embraced by compassion and comfort as I stood for an iphone selfie pic that was surely in need of its built in ‘best portrait’ option!  

I didn’t know if I was going to laugh or cry when I saw my reflection in the camera lens. But the beaming smile to my right told me that crying was NOT my story today. All I felt instead was proud. Proud that I could stand in public and be accepted. Proud that perhaps one person who may see Mike’s social media post might just be one little bit less self-conscious about their own reflection. That they may borrow some of my self-love in that moment and help celebrate that I conquered that moment on that day; that I chose that moment to be happy. And that a good guy (a bloody awesome guy!) helped me believe that I was going to be ok.

Here's Michael and Me @ Walt's Espresso Bar, Hamilton, Brisbane.  

Under the shower.

Losing my hair from chemo

I sat in the shower as the water washed over my head and ran my hands over, knowing that I was about to bear witness to loss. At first it was wonderment. And relief that this moment was finally here - the one thing everyone fears the most with chemo. I'm always one for planning and preparation, but I just couldn't reconcile that there were literally hundreds of hairs on my palms each and every time I touched my sore head. It was as if I was seeing it for the first time, every time. Like those tv infomercial ads that never stop..."But wait!! There's more!!"

Then I cried. I'm not sure why. It's not like I didn't know it was coming. Maybe because this was about more than just hair, because it felt like a moment to be reborn. Under the shower. Peeling off hundreds of layers. Of memories. Of lost wishes. Of new hopes. Is this really what it means to have so much of ourselves wrapped up in our hair? Men are now becoming more able to save/regrow/regain otherwise lost youth or confidence. But for women it's so much a part of our path into becoming a woman and owning who we are. It's every compliment. Every touch of a lost love. Of a heated embrace. Running fingers through fringes - that was my thing. Every hairdresser that would comment on the colour, the wave, the texture. Red. Ranga. Strawb.

My self-confidence, like almost every other woman, was so intricately tied up in my hair (pardon the pun). I applaud anyone who, like me, has sat in a hairdresser's chair, waiting for the big reveal to match the expectations and future hopes that come from the new look - sometimes it's for a new job, or to cut/hack off the pain of a breakup. But there are also those times we silently cried at the realisation we just didn't look like the photo. Or that the pain was still there despite the dead memories on the salon floor. And yet we still paid our hundreds of dollars only to walk out, go home, and find ourselves in this exact moment... crying under the shower.

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.

Heart sounds.

My first day of chemotherapy

I heard my heart today. Loud. Strong. A statement that this is where the leadership role is forming to carry my body through the next 9 months of treatment.   

My mind...usually the form of concrete, no cracks, just rock solid foundation for whatever chaos may ensue. But today, resembling more like the sand to mix the concrete. Panicked about where things were, what bag, what I'd thought I'd packed but clearly left in another bag within a bag. Frantic pulses disguising fear. Chunks of confidence and composure mixed in with moments of inner madness. Silently crying into the wall during the heart ultrasound. Staring at the edges of two holes in the wall. Tracing the outline with my mind, wondering what it would be like to crawl up inside one of them and feel nothing for once.

Then feeling everything walking into the chemo ward.

Disbelief and relief at once. Grieving for all the people next to me dying of the same disease. And yet guilt-filled gratitude that I wasn't one of them; at how truly random cancer can be; at how truly random life can be. 

Life. This had to be about letting go of the one I had, metaphorically thank God. How else can I honour those who do not get this second chance. The mothers, like the one I met today, who have to bury their children. The people who don’t get the early warning signs.

And there it was again. My heart. Beating. A little faster, yes, and feeling a little bit like it was sitting in my throat. But it was charging that medication with full force around my body. It was fighting for me and whatever was waiting for me. 

We must be willing to get rid of the life we've planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us.

- Joseph Campbell

Moving from Regret to Accept.

The infertility reality check.

This is not a lesson about mutant genes and mutated cells. There are hundreds of expert information sources out there to explain the medical reason about why cells develop at a certain rate within certain conditions and create the perfect storm for cancer to grow in your body.

There is no blame, no misdirected responsibility about ‘if only I didn’t drink soy milk’ or ‘if only I had eaten organic vegies’ or ‘I should never have gone on the pill…’. There is, however, a tougher task ahead to accept that cancer does not care about timing, or whether you’re ready, or whether you’ve got all your ducks in a row before it punches you in the face. For me, the twisted gene pool may suggest it was just a matter of time. But time was not on my side for this.

At 40, the world of breast cancer still considers me ‘young’, but in the world of maternal matters, I’m geriatric. In fact, I’m past geriatric. I’m graveyard. It’s like the worst oopsie moment in history … Had a baby yet? Oh ! Oops !  There I was thinking that, even if the geriatric ovaries were already in retirement, surely IVF would sweep in as a superhero and deliver me a time machine so I could go back to my 20s and plan for the next 20 years before 'life just happened'. 

You see, I seem to have forgotten to take on the advice of my smug-married friends to just settle down, get married, and pop out a kid in between building a professional career and falling in love with all the wrong guys at the right time and falling in lust with all the right guys at the wrong time and having a mental break down and building myself back up again and moving towns, cities, states, jobs, desperate to find something more than what I had. What I was. Who I could become. How many times had I felt the sting of loss and disappointment that ‘he’ was not going to be the one. That my window was closing. And you know what, for most of that time, I was not exactly prioritising procreation. It was all about recreation. But along comes a magical man when I'm 39 who would finally love me for me. Would see what truths lie behind my eyes, would breathe life into my heart, would inject hope and happiness into my soul. For a moment, I allowed myself to dream that stupidly girlie girl dream of a wedding dress and a house on a hill and a chance to create a new life from new love.

But this is where Injustice and Unfairness and Regret all came to dance at my pity-party. The options of having a baby when you’re about to take on cancer are less than great. It’s basically a done deal – without exploring a myriad of options and impossible timelines/risks/consequences, it aint’ gonna happen on my terms. I have one shot that's sitting in a freezer somewhere waiting to see what's possible in about three years. Until then, I will find time to grieve what could have been. But for now, it’s something that I’ve added to my arsenal to remember why I need to take this time for me to heal, to recover, to regenerate, to re-emerge as something and someone who refuses to sit in the passenger seat waiting to arrive to meet Happiness. I’m done with the bullshit rhetoric about ‘when x happens, and y happens, and the planetary alignment joins up with the sun and moon in z’ … THEN I’ll be happy. No. Today I am happy. I am ecstatic. I now move into the world of preserving and protecting my next phase of life. A phase that is still going to be full of love and hope that offers sanctuary for my soul. Of actually living. Chemotherapy and radiation are my friends. So too is my cold press juicer, some turmeric and wheat grass shots! And I will embrace all of what is to come, including the crappy side effects, to make sure that I am not sitting in another hospital bed unless it is when I close my eyes for the last time at age 93. I may not be surrounded by my borne-children, but I sure as hell will be surrounded by love.