Best Laid Plans.

Reconciling what was and what now is

I thought I had planned everything in the lead up to my first day back at work. Right down to where I was going to get my morning coffee.  When I drove into work and saw my favourite coffee place had a ‘for lease’ sign in the front window, it was probably an omen of the morning that was coming. If only I had included on my list “managing disproportionate emotional response to Every-Thing”.

I wasn’t prepared for the electric shock every time someone walked past and I saw them pause; their puzzled brain-cells trying to reconcile the familiar face but unfamiliar hair-cut… and then the gradual increase in volume: “Jodie !!! You’re BACK !!!” At first, a lovely, albeit loud, sense of re-connection. But after the 10th time, I hit my ever-so-quick-to-disintegrate emotional threshold. I managed to delay losing my shit for the 3 minutes it took me to scramble for the comfort of the lift and find some outside oxygen.

It’s been two months since I’ve been back at work. Some days I feel like time has stood still for that whole year and I’ve just walked back in from getting a coffee. But other days I feel the weight of a cancer carcass strapped to my leg … Do people see it when I walk by? Do I look like someone who had cancer? (the short back and sides is a bit of a giveaway). Is that what people are saying in the kitchen: ‘She’s the one who had cancer’? I was asked to update my online work profile picture recently because some people simply still don’t recognise me. But I don’t want to – a part of me just wants to look like her again. 

The other day was one of those days when I just wanted to forget about the 12 month time warp. My photo ID flipped open and there she was – Jodie B.C. (Before Cancer). Long strawberry blonde hair, smiling, clueless about what was actually important in her life, and clueless about the extraordinary way that Life was intending on flipping the table she was sitting at when she least expected it.

It’s like it all happened in a vacuum… I was gone. Now I’m back. I’m driving the same route to work (with a LOT more traffic), doing the same job (part-time) with the same people (mostly) in the same building (just with a new fit-out). The danger comes from allowing myself to clamber back inside the hamster wheel to start walking/jogging/running in the same spot with my eyes fixed at the same wall.

The kicker is that Jodie A.C. (After Cancer) has a very different view of the world, and it’s one that I’m forever grateful for that I would not have ‘but for’ cancer. Like going from those old black and white 20-tonne TVs with the wire antennae hanging half-cocked delivering a fuzzy outline of a face at best. To now having a High-Def, 75 inch full colour smart TV that can probably make me dinner while I’m binge-watching Big Little Lies!  The change in view is beyond comprehension. It’s got me asking: Is this all there is? Do people not want more than keeping everything as it always has been? Am I allowed to ask for/expect more?  

I now accept that a disconnect exists between people who have experienced trauma or grief from a health/life crisis and those who have not. For those of us in the “have” group, we each bear scars but also silent strength from being forced to make a set of choices: Change or Forget. Accept or Deny. Conviction or Acquiesce. Resolve or Apathy. The tolerances long-established when we were part of the “have nots” no longer apply. Perspective and gratitude can be lost on those who have never had to claw their way towards acceptance and hope. For our troubles, the “haves” are bestowed the luxury of selfishness (my word for self-prioritisation) and time – we make decisions based on what we need, whenever we want. Let’s call it an ‘entitlement’ … not usually a favourite word of mine, but in this case, it serves the purpose of nourishing and nurturing ourselves, enforcing boundaries, speaking truths, and believing in all that’s possible.  (It doesn’t, however serve to justify the M&Ms binges that I’ve been indulging in lately... but that’s for another post).

You can’t plan for change – I mean, as a change manager in a previous life, you kind of can, but the key principle in change management is that it relies on individual ‘motive’ to get it across the line. The desire to want change. And let’s be honest – most people would absolutely avoid such significant change. Because great change usually comes from great pain. It’s not exactly something we are all sprinting up to the front of the line for….”I’ll have an El Grande serve of Pain, thanks! With a side order of Shit Sandwich.” And then the guy behind the bar says, “No worries, here’s your Change!” (just a little joke, right?).

On a serious note, my change plan for now is simple while I ponder what more I want from my world - to continue to believe the words that are etched on a small plaque hanging in my bathroom: May every sunrise hold more promise, and every sunset hold more peace.

“Though no one can go back and make a brand new start, anyone can start from now and make a brand new ending." - Carl Bard

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.

How I got here.

A bit more about me.   

In my past life, prior to this diagnosis of breast cancer, I was immersed in the world of important meetings, structure, routine, coffee breaks and chasing clocks. I was building a career narrative that said I’m making a difference – I was changing the world and fighting for those who couldn’t necessarily fight for themselves. Instead of using my law degree to rack up billable hours, self-fund a lux yacht and push myself into an early heart attack, I worked on changing how government does its business of supporting its people.  Everything from child sex abuse, bushfire trauma and recovery, anti-corruption, mental health, alcohol abuse, and domestic violence. I walked tall and proud with my cape under my black skirt suit (with undies on the inside).  I felt like I was put on the planet to fix stuff, because I was damn good at it. Implement the impossible project.  Meet the impossible timeline.  The higher the degree of difficulty, the more I said, “Just watch me”. Unfortunately, I applied that same Ms Fix-It approach to my relationships. I would find the next broken-winged bird to help put them back together but ultimately, every time, I just ended up watching them fly away. They were healed, and I was alone. So, I would dive right back into the next impossible work task and get busy saving the world again.

But three years ago, it was my wing that broke. I was so busy fixing everything else and everyone else, I didn’t even feel the first snap of bone. It wasn’t until I was hanging from the cliff of depression that I realised I had forgotten about how I should be saving myself. And by then it was too late. The person I knew had gone, and instead I was left staring at the face of a stranger. Someone who couldn’t decide whether to have a shower, stay in bed, get dressed, eat, talk. The ins and outs of me going back in time and re-examining that story will come later, because that story is not uncommon. Just like breast cancer. But I write this blog in the knowledge, or at least the gut feel, that the two are not unrelated in my story. The cause of both lies in my absence of compassion. Not for others, and every social justice cause – for those, I delivered compassion in bucket loads. It was the absence of compassion for myself and using the noise of ‘busyness’ to drown out the quiet voices of self-care and self-love. 

Cancer, for me, is now history repeating, just with a different punch line. I managed to piece myself back together with what probably resembles a patch up job with sticky tape, because I clearly hadn’t finished healing. The toll now is on my physical health. And ironically (or not), its breast cancer – surely something for women that represents the purist source of nourishment, nurture and love.

I had two choices when I was sitting across from cancer – to invite anger and rage to join in or ask them to quietly leave the room. In the end, it wasn’t a hard choice to make because of the power of a story that could just as easily have been mine. It continues to serve as a sign post that doesn’t say “why me?”, but instead “why not me?”.

The story was gifted to me on my first day of chemotherapy. I was sitting next to a woman, a mother, whose beloved daughter (my age) was going to die in the next 6-12 months. Cancer had returned for the third time in five years.  It was a factual story. By the end, the tears were mine, not hers. She wasn’t angry, not one bit.  She was instead proud that her daughter was ticking off her bucket list with her husband in quiet surrender to the inevitable injustice that Fate was going to deliver. It was the most graceful ode to acceptance I have ever heard. 

And so I chose at that moment to commit to myself that I would do everything I could to change the tone of my story. To accept any and every opportunity I had to find a ‘something’ where others may only see ‘nothing’.  This story of mine is still being written, I’m only part of the way there, but that’s all it is – my story. I haven’t set out to represent the collective view of every person who has met cancer or lost someone they love from it.

What I hope to share above all else is that, in amongst a hundred choices that may have been taken away, including how the story may end, we can still choose how we turn each page.

Copyright: Image provided by Marina Locke Photography.