80. What a year!

I don't normally post in the week now, usually every couple of Sundays, why I'm not sure, as no one reads these days. As most people find with cancer, once the emergency is over, once it becomes old news, once your told to go away and only come back to be checked now and then, you are meant to be cured, happy, grateful... so why would you need a cancer blog, or any readers after that?? 🥱 Mainly because cancer doesn't end, I was going to say doesn't end when they discharge you from immediate treatment, but no, it NEVER ends! If you bang a huge 6 inch nail into a trunk of a tree with a sledge hammer, you have a tree still trying to grow, still trying to be normal, trying not to let the nail poison and kill it. when someone comes and pulls the nail out, you have the same tree, but now it has a huge hole where the nail was, and over time, it heals itself, sometimes gently, sometimes with help, the hole fills itself, take on a knotted scar where the hole once was, the tree continues to live, continues to grow but its not the same, it has the knot, it remembers the nail. You aren't, can never be, the same, even if you 99% recover on the outside, which is rare, the inside, where no one see's, still remembers, late at night when everyone is asleep, you think about how many nights you laid in pain, frightened to get up the next day, to go in and damage your weak body; remember how there were times you wished you'd not found out and just died un diagnosed, or how you'd made promises to the sky if you could be here 'this time next year' the things you'd do, say, be, to pay your dues for survival. No after cancer, it never stops. The grim reaper is your permanent stalker now, lurking in the shadows of the next oncology appointment or scan. Obviously with my type of cancer there are the added extras of coming to terms with the side effects of the radiotherapy.

I did really well once the actual treatment ended, and sheer spite got me through the first few weeks, and determination to pick myself up without too much help. I ate again quickly, I tasted again super fast, and although I suffered with the 'claggy' throat and soreness, I still do, I just accepted it as part of the process, and legacy of the damage. Now its been 7 months since I finished treatment. My swallow is weak some days, I do choke on food, especially when I'm tired, hot, or not concentrating. Rice is one of the killers, bitty and dry, chicken breast, by the time you chew it enough to swallow with little or no saliva now in your mouth, its a dry ball of fluffy strands that cling to your throat and threaten to kill you with a cross between suffocation and choking. You quickly learn to never start eating unless you have a glass of something in front of you. Drinks are all ok apart from water and tea still, which STILL taste awful, like metallic, but not. And cold drinks sometimes set all my teeth off like I've stuck a fork on a metal filling where my teeth have been affected by the radiation.

My jaw at the very back where I had the one and only molar removed has never been the same since they took it out basically, the gum never healed properly where they sliced it open and then stitched it and the bone there actually aches sometimes and most of the time a full yawn will be agony on that side of my mouth so is quietly avoided with a stifled attempt like when your sitting in a meeting and cant let on your bored stupid. My throat at the back feels like its HUGE!!!! Where my tonsils once were, it feels like theres this massive empty space, and when I swallow now it feels like all the food rushes into that open space, and just sticks there instead of falling down my neck to be carried by a gulp on its way down properly. So every one of my 10 mouthfuls ( yes I count them when I have a meal still, I try and make 10 mouthfuls) has to be thought about, strategically planned, portion sized and executed.

Most days I eat because I have to, and to join in with a meal time, but its no pleasure, what with the dampened taste and differences, the fear of choking or making my throat sore again I have to admit I'd rather not bother. For an over weight person, that's a difficult place to be as well, as after years of being told to lose weight, now I'm programmed to think not wanting to eat is a good thing, but to the oncology team, even though my bmi is too high, weight loss is still not encouraged. The mental battle of that conflicting advice is another challenge my brain has to cope with on top of everything else everyday. Excitement if i lose another pound and fear that I might somehow make the cancer come back if I'm not eating enough and run down nutritionally. But I'm here today, 4th August, a year to the day I sat in that room and got told I had cancer. In the past year I have done things I thought I would never do, out of courage? No! out of necessity. I'm not brave, but I've fought. I have fought my own fears, that haunted me long before my diagnosis, stood alone and faced strangers and places that every atom of my being told me to run away from and hide, but cancer took away that choice, I had to stay. I allowed people to do things to me, and hurt me, frighten me, and then thanked them for it. And I stood in the dead of night staring at the stars and begged for death, life, time, forgiveness, and sometimes just an hour without pain. When faced with your own mortality, you make promises, sometimes to your version of God, and sometimes just to yourself, about the person you will be if you get through this. Its been a year, I made it so far, I'm still me. But now the version of me that only I knew, not the version I made sure everyone else saw. So its been my first year of living with cancer, and I finally realise now, I will always be patient 27.