New Year and nearly a week later the first post of the year.

As regular readers will know, Xmas is not my favourite time of year and my adventures with cancer 9 years ago haven’t really changed this. This year though it was better than some, partly because I had the two teen cats around and partly because I am feeling very content with life. Having one of my half brothers and his girlfriend staying just before Xmas was good.  Xmas day was fairly busy as visited my mum who is now in a care home due to her dementia and then on to visit my stepfather who is in a rehab unit following complex ankle surgery. Doing these visits reminded me of when I worked in the NHS and a therapeutic community and working over Xmas. I always enjoyed working over the festive period, partly because the focus was on giving and not receiving which if I am honest is what I prefer. 

This weekend is around the time 9 years ago when I began to feel better again after my treatment had ended on the 24th. They warned me that it would take 2 weeks or so for me to begin to feel less of the side effects of the Chemo and Radio Therapies. They were right and I can still remember fairly clearly waking up one morning and noticing I felt a bit better. I still felt fucking awful but the slight improvement was a massive boost for me. I also remember being taken out by my mum and stepfather for lunch, they had checked that there was an easy-to-chew-and-swallow veggie option at the pub. Unfortunately, once we sat down we discovered that it had run out, so I had the daunting task of eating a veggie nut roast and all the trimmings. So I did what I had sometimes done before, take some extra morphine so I would eat with less pain. The next day, the dietician from the Cancer Centre called and asked how I was doing, I said I was beginning to feel better and explained about the meal the day before, she was amazed and said that was totally unexpected and it was the first of many times where I heard the phrase or variation of you are doing really or unexpectedly well. 

Looking back over the years since my diagnosis and treatment I have mostly been very positive about the outcome, despite the odds being against me because I had dismissed my sore throats as minor and connected to the air conditioning in the office I moved to a bit before the time they started. The time that it was hardest to be fully positive was in the period between the treatment ending and getting told in March that there were no detectable signs of cancer. As I continued to recover from the treatment understandably my thoughts began to shift to the future. I do remember thinking that if it hadn’t been successful, I would be given further treatment that would and worried about how I would tolerate that, I really couldn’t go through the hell of the chemo and radio therapy again and felt very relieved when I was told that would not be an option. It wasn’t until later that I took in that this was because I couldn’t safely have more radiotherapy to my neck area again. My belief was always that I would cured of the cancer and during the worst time of the side effects the worry was that I wouldn’t be able to tolerate the side effects to allow this to happen, not that the treatments wouldn’t work if completed. 

As I write this entry it is a lovely day, a bit cold being only a couple of degrees or so above freezing. It is dry though, which after the weeks of rain and wind we have had is very welcome. I know during the winter months that I need to keep my neck warm, if I don’t the left side that had the surgery as well as the radio and chemotherapy seizes up and becomes leadenly aching and this exacerbates the pain in my collar bone. Yesterday, I of course forgot this when I went for a brief clifftop walk, trying to banish the current bout of fatigue, so suffered all evening until my sister reminded me that I should use my neck warming pad. Cancer for some of us keeps giving us these reminders of its unwelcome visit and eviction from our bodies, I often joke I am fortunate to still be here to experience these ongoing side effects. I do feel fortunate that I am still here but there is a bit of me that feels slight resentment that I am often the one who experiences the long-term effects whilst others escape them. I then feel a bit guilty for feeling like this because I do feel really fortunate to still be here and able to grumble a bit about them.

Since my cancer treatment, it sometimes seems that I got most of the long-term side effects they warned me about. This is in contrast to them telling me how well I was doing immediately after my treatment and recovery period. I did really push myself then to get fully back to normal, but I never achieved this. I had times when I got close but the effort it took always took a toll on me that I tried to ignore until it got to the point nearly a year after the treatment ended that I had to admit I wouldn’t get back to where I was before. Breaking my collarbone for the first time looking back was a good thing to happen when it did because it forced me to confront the truth that I wasn’t able to do what I did before. Work was too demanding now and a job I mostly loved and found enjoyable had become a thorn in my side and a constant reminder that I was not as able as I was before. I didn’t have the stamina to work full time, the adrenaline coursing through me due to work stresses and the stresses of treatment and recovery couldn’t mask this any longer. The acceptance of this was helped by the broken collarbone and allowed me to mentally and emotionally transition to retirement more easily I think and weirdly the second break to the collarbone just before I officially retired helped as well.

In July this year, I will reach the 10th anniversary of discovering the lump of the largest secondary tumour. Whilst I was always optimistic about my treatment outcome, I never really gave any thought to where I would be in 10 years time. This time next year I will be nearly 10 years clear and it seems somewhat unreal. Cancer doesn’t feature a great deal in my thoughts now, partly I think due to time and partly due to this blog, where I take the opportunity to process the background noise of thoughts about it that are lurking in the recesses of my mind. Fatigue and pain take up more of my attention but I don’t usually focus on the connection between them and my cancer treatment. They are just part of my life and something I need to take into account as I plan things. I need not plan to do too much. I need to remember not to overdo it, something I still am not good at and probably never will be.

A recurring theme through this blog and something I held to be true long before I started it is a strong belief that it is important to notice the good bits in your life however small. Doing this won’t take away the difficult or horrible bits but might make them easier to cope with. In my work with people in crisis over the years, I sometimes asked people to think of one, two or three good or better things that had happened to them during the day. They didn’t have to be big things, it could be something really small, like someone smiling at you as you passed in the street or as you paid for something, or maybe they noticed something they liked or thought was beautiful. Alongside this when doing emotional well-being and mental health training for professionals I used to ask them what was the most important and easiest intervention they could do every day, which of course is to smile more because a smile like happiness is contagious. When going through the worst bits of my treatment and after effects I always remembered these things and did them and I believe they at the very least made my journey easier and at best helped me stay positive which research shows slightly improved outcomes in treatment. I have often ended these blogs with one phrase, so I will repeat the phrase again to end this one, “life is better if you notice the good bits”.

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