Lisa C Hinsley
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At least it was quick…

9/11/2014

8 Comments

 
Just to get it out there, no one has said this to me or insulted or offended me with this little cliché of a statement. It was me who thought it when watching one of those cancer awareness adverts that seem to be all over the telly these days.

Someone was diagnosed and passed away within weeks. My first thought was, ‘At least it was quick.’ Then I caught myself, I was stunned. Had that thought really just popped up in my mind? As someone who is ‘suffering’ (should that be afflicted, infected, fighting or just simply call me another person dealing with cancer?) with the same infernal medical issue, albeit of the bowel cancer flavour, I was horrified with myself. I may be poorly, I may be in pain sometimes, I may know that my life expectancy will be shorter than I had hoped (I was planning on doing a hundred plus, haha) but the last thing I want is for my illness to be quick.

I’m falling apart slowly. I know this as well. But it doesn’t change the desperate need in me to live. The last thing I want is for my time to be quick. I’m not fighting, like everyone says. “She put up a good battle fighting this horrible disease…” That’s what people say, isn’t it. But for me, it’s not true. I’m living my life, like any other person. I just have these awful masses on my liver that if I don’t go and get my juice (chemo) every two weeks, they will grow and take over my liver until life is no longer sustainable. But I’m not fighting. I go with this flow, get my juice, sleep a lot, and try and make sure I do fun things on my good days.

Maybe for some people it would be a relief to go quickly. Not me. I’ll put up with the aches and pains, the uncertainly and that damned scanxiety every four months as I wait to see what that latest CT scan is going to tell the doc. I’ve come to terms with the facts of my disease, and I am actually in a good, happy place. When the end finally comes, I want people to say, “At least she took a long time to go.” I’m that bad smell that refuses to disperse, and I’m planning on sticking around as long as possible.

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Anniversaries

18/6/2014

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Somehow time has run away with me. I only realised today how long it’s been since I made a new blog post. Today I’ve been thinking about anniversaries. In a few weeks I will be hitting a landmark date: two years since my diagnosis. Two years since I started getting gut wrenching pains that sent me to the doctors. There was none of that NHS delay people shout about in the news. I was sent from the surgery to the hospital. Less than a week later I was operated on.

I ended up with a foot less of my intestines and a diagnosis of bowel cancer. There was lots of surprise about my age. Too young, I heard this so many times. Too young, and yet here I am. While the doc had me open, he had a good rummage around my insides, and found the bonus tumours on my liver. I’ve been ‘fighting’ since.

Is it fighting? I’m not sure it is. I aim to survive each day. I try to hit goals, like birthdays. I managed to outlive my grandparents, the last died earlier this year. Now I want to outlive the oldest of my cats. I’ve seen in my eldest son’s twenty-first birthday and my youngest’s thirteenth. Now I aim to see in my daughter’s twenty-first. That means surviving almost another two years.

With this anniversary I can rejoice a little. I’ve already outlived expectations. Sadly many people I befriended who were in similar stages of diagnosis to me have passed away. It makes me both happy and upset to be alive. What made me different that I am still here, getting hit with chemo when friends have died? Life seems random, it picks and chooses who gets to stick around a little longer on this amazing world we have.

Two years. Two years too long. I’m bored with the whole problem. I want to move on, put it all behind me. But cancer is like a cheesy horror film, it keeps popping up and growling at me.

So what am I doing? Mainly I am writing, trying to get stories that have haunted me for years onto paper before I take them into the ground. All is not depressing and sad. I still have hope that chemo will do its job and suddenly I’ll find myself in remission. What is life without hope? Plus I’ve got my wonderful kids and parents, a fab extended family, more friends than I could ever have imagined being blessed with, and a husband who is so supportive and loving that he takes my breath away.

I guess my main goal right now is to conveniently forget that I have cancer and get on with enjoying each and every day. I recommend this to everyone. Forget the problems, wear a smile, and remember to live.

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Doubt

27/4/2014

5 Comments

 
Short word, big impact, deep meaning: doubt. Roll it around your mouth and think what it means to you. Everyone is plagued by doubt at some point in their life, if not on a daily basis. Small feathers of doubt tickling your feet as you stand before the sandwich counter trying to decide which one the other half will want. Then there’s that elephant in the room as you jump into a new job, one you’re not sure you can do, and failure is so easy, success never a given.

My friend Graham noticed that I’d been a bit quiet lately. I’ve not been posting on Facebook. I’ve not put up any new blogs. I’ve hardly been responding to messages and emails. I’ve turned ostrich, my head is stuck in the sand and I am trying to pretend there’s nothing wrong here. It’s easier that way, to pretend. As children we grow up in a land of make believe. As a writer, I have chosen to continue on that path and it’s so much easier to dip into a made-up world and pretend everything is okay.

Problem is, that little word doubt, coming back to haunt me. That’s what Graham asked me. He understands me better than most.  He’s had bowel cancer, been treated and come out the other side, hopefully free of the disease for the rest of his life. But he remembers that doubt, my guess is before every check-up and follow-up scan as part of his care, he worries himself silly – will this scan be the one that tells the doc it’s back?

I’m in the middle of my course of chemo, three cycles down, three to go. My body is tired and my immunity is struggling. I’ve had number four chemo postponed twice now as the docs wait for my bloods to come back to some semblance of normality. It’s now that my mind is taken over with the thought: is it worth it? There is every possibility that I am going through all of this and the tumours inside me are growing regardless. There’s also the possibility that they are being beaten back. But the second possibility only visits on rare occasions. Mostly I worry that the headaches that have been plaguing me mean it’s gone to my brain. Or the ache in my leg means it’s gone to my bones.

A little while ago another friend of mine, Tricia, alerted me to this article in The Guardian: link.

George Orwell has always been a bit of an authorly hero to me. I read 1984 at a young age, and it really affected me. This passage stuck out at me as I read the article:

Richard Blair (speaking about George Orwell) believes that his father was given excessive doses of the new wonder drug. The side effects were horrific (throat ulcers, blisters in the mouth, hair loss, peeling skin and the disintegration of toe and fingernails) but in March 1948, after a three-month course, the TB symptoms had disappeared. "It's all over now, and evidently the drug has done its stuff," Orwell told his publisher. "It's rather like sinking the ship to get rid of the rats, but worth it if it works."

Orwell is long dead, but his words can still make a difference. He gave me something I really needed, the opposite to that horrible word, doubt. He gave me hope. If not for me, for the people of the future, people who will look back at the suffering of people like me and shake off a chill as they pop a pill that cures their cancer in weeks. Because that time will come. To be honest, my chemo is not the worst out there; I am actually quite lucky with my treatments. Doesn’t make the drugs they give me any less horrific, doesn’t take away that snappy attitude that comes over me in the days leading up to my next session of chemo, it doesn’t make me dread going to the hospital any less, and it doesn’t make me forget that I’ve now had twenty-four sessions of chemotherapy.

But in the middle of all this grimness, I have remembered about hope, one of the things that has kept humans going for so many thousands of years. There are days when I feel like I am that sinking ship, too many days plagued with doubt. All I can hope is before I am completely sunk that the rats disappear. I expected him to get out his pack of fags. Instead he rested his arms on his knees and his head on his hands and very quietly began to sob. I didn't know if I should stop and comfort him or leave him alone. I'm not sure I would have helped, I would have been crying along with him. I hate cancer so much.

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