Retrospect
For the last year and a half I have (somewhat) documented my journey going through how it feels to be diagnosed and the subsequent treatment I have gone through upon having a brain tumour. Had I been told years previous that my entire life and everything in it would literally be thrown in the air I probably would have scoffed at the idea and gone on with my life. 19 year olds don’t get tumours, and they don’t go through treatment till they’re 21. Except they do, and I did. The year 2020 was meant to be the year for us all, we entered a new decade with such hope and perseverance and the daily task of being indoors is hitting us pretty hard. While there are a minority of people who are being absolute reprobates about this situation, the majority of us are following simple lockdown rules in hopes of being able to see our loved ones again in good health.
As of writing this (27/04/20) I have been in lockdown for 6 weeks. I’m an ‘extremely vulnerable’ individual: one of those people you hear about in the news who need to stay indoors for 12 weeks in order to be shielded from society and protected from the virus. Should I get this virus, there is a high chance I would be hospitalised and my current immune system means the probability of my case being fatal is high. You can understand where my hatred for those who flout the simple rules of lockdown stems from, seeing as any of these people could potentially be responsible for me contracting the virus. This year, therefore, has inadvertently become another year of me fighting to stay alive in spite of an illness. Last year on the 14th March I began 6 and a half weeks of RapidArc radiotherapy, and this year I began my lockdown on the 16th March. In possibly one of the strangest coincidences, I have spent both this year and last fighting against an illness, down to the month.
While some people like to frame their lives as a walking paradox, I feel like I genuinely meet the requirements for this. It is this year that I meet the 1 year milestones for many phases of my treatment, having already passed the anniversaries of my craniotomies and now my radiotherapy sessions. Soon, the 1 year anniversary of beginning temozolomide will roll around, and my journey will be complete. My life is slowly piecing itself back together and returning to what feels like ‘normality’ in a time where the world is in disarray. While my inability to leave the house is rendering me insane, I’m also continuously remembering what I was doing on this day a year ago and finding it hard to comprehend what has changed in that time. To say that the last year or so has been eventful is an understatement, and it is a time in which I have analysed in the strangest of ways.
Upon hearing people praise me for my strength or resilience, I generally brush these comments aside in a ‘I just did what I had to do’ attitude. I’m genuinely not one to praise myself or my accomplishments and I feel this diagnosis further instilled that in me; I’d much rather shift praise to the surgeons, nurses, and oncology team who have gotten me through almost 2 years of treatment. Yet as I sit here looking back I feel a small tinge of pride in myself for manoeuvring the effects of treatment, both emotional and physical. However, I look back on myself and who I was in treatment and feel somewhat solemn; I see a girl who was scared and horrifically lonely in spite of having multitudes of people around her. I see someone who clung to frayed friendships in attempts to just feel like she had someone to talk to once a month. I see someone wedged between wanting to hide away from the world in shame of her appearance and wanting the world to revolve around her just this one time for some sympathy. Retrospectively I look at myself in admiration and shame, I clung on to people who left me alone while isolating myself from those who stuck by my side from beginning to this very second. I was fearful, not for the sake of my physical life but for the idea that my life was changing and there was nothing I could do to guide it. While there were days I felt like my mental health was as broken as my physical health, I now feel that these days were turning points in my development. Cancelled meetings and near empty birthday celebrations stood to mould my personal journey, they provided an almost cathartic severing of my past life. It was not long after I wrote ‘elegy’: a poem in which I officially said goodbye to my former self.
I generally steer clear of romanticising subjects such as a trauma, to me there is nothing alluring or soft about treatment. Yet, I feel that each time I walked out of my radiotherapy session or each time I swallowed a chemotherapy tablet not only was I killing off a tumorous cell I was also ridding myself of a person I couldn’t be anymore. While I may not have thought that way at the time it has become quite poignant to me that I was simultaneously eradicating tumour cells and an unobtainable self. At the time I was so adamant that I was ‘not my tumour’ that I refused to understand how the ordeal was shaping me as a person, it was because of the tumour that I am able to look in retrospect and view my personal growth and feel proud of the person I have become because of it.
While the new year may be proving to be difficult as a collective, there is also adequate time for true reflection into the actions we have taken and how that has shaped us into who we are today. I may not wake up every morning feeling as heathy as I once did, but subconsciously there will always be a part of me that feels blessed to have woken up at all. That is something lying on the operating table three times has taught me: that just waking up is a start for me. The biology of my brain may have changed (I now have a lovely ‘cavity’ where Bert once sat) but the ‘growth’ I actually made was in myself and I can sit here a year or so on and finally feel pride in myself.
As of writing this (27/04/20) I have been in lockdown for 6 weeks. I’m an ‘extremely vulnerable’ individual: one of those people you hear about in the news who need to stay indoors for 12 weeks in order to be shielded from society and protected from the virus. Should I get this virus, there is a high chance I would be hospitalised and my current immune system means the probability of my case being fatal is high. You can understand where my hatred for those who flout the simple rules of lockdown stems from, seeing as any of these people could potentially be responsible for me contracting the virus. This year, therefore, has inadvertently become another year of me fighting to stay alive in spite of an illness. Last year on the 14th March I began 6 and a half weeks of RapidArc radiotherapy, and this year I began my lockdown on the 16th March. In possibly one of the strangest coincidences, I have spent both this year and last fighting against an illness, down to the month.
While some people like to frame their lives as a walking paradox, I feel like I genuinely meet the requirements for this. It is this year that I meet the 1 year milestones for many phases of my treatment, having already passed the anniversaries of my craniotomies and now my radiotherapy sessions. Soon, the 1 year anniversary of beginning temozolomide will roll around, and my journey will be complete. My life is slowly piecing itself back together and returning to what feels like ‘normality’ in a time where the world is in disarray. While my inability to leave the house is rendering me insane, I’m also continuously remembering what I was doing on this day a year ago and finding it hard to comprehend what has changed in that time. To say that the last year or so has been eventful is an understatement, and it is a time in which I have analysed in the strangest of ways.
Upon hearing people praise me for my strength or resilience, I generally brush these comments aside in a ‘I just did what I had to do’ attitude. I’m genuinely not one to praise myself or my accomplishments and I feel this diagnosis further instilled that in me; I’d much rather shift praise to the surgeons, nurses, and oncology team who have gotten me through almost 2 years of treatment. Yet as I sit here looking back I feel a small tinge of pride in myself for manoeuvring the effects of treatment, both emotional and physical. However, I look back on myself and who I was in treatment and feel somewhat solemn; I see a girl who was scared and horrifically lonely in spite of having multitudes of people around her. I see someone who clung to frayed friendships in attempts to just feel like she had someone to talk to once a month. I see someone wedged between wanting to hide away from the world in shame of her appearance and wanting the world to revolve around her just this one time for some sympathy. Retrospectively I look at myself in admiration and shame, I clung on to people who left me alone while isolating myself from those who stuck by my side from beginning to this very second. I was fearful, not for the sake of my physical life but for the idea that my life was changing and there was nothing I could do to guide it. While there were days I felt like my mental health was as broken as my physical health, I now feel that these days were turning points in my development. Cancelled meetings and near empty birthday celebrations stood to mould my personal journey, they provided an almost cathartic severing of my past life. It was not long after I wrote ‘elegy’: a poem in which I officially said goodbye to my former self.
I generally steer clear of romanticising subjects such as a trauma, to me there is nothing alluring or soft about treatment. Yet, I feel that each time I walked out of my radiotherapy session or each time I swallowed a chemotherapy tablet not only was I killing off a tumorous cell I was also ridding myself of a person I couldn’t be anymore. While I may not have thought that way at the time it has become quite poignant to me that I was simultaneously eradicating tumour cells and an unobtainable self. At the time I was so adamant that I was ‘not my tumour’ that I refused to understand how the ordeal was shaping me as a person, it was because of the tumour that I am able to look in retrospect and view my personal growth and feel proud of the person I have become because of it.
While the new year may be proving to be difficult as a collective, there is also adequate time for true reflection into the actions we have taken and how that has shaped us into who we are today. I may not wake up every morning feeling as heathy as I once did, but subconsciously there will always be a part of me that feels blessed to have woken up at all. That is something lying on the operating table three times has taught me: that just waking up is a start for me. The biology of my brain may have changed (I now have a lovely ‘cavity’ where Bert once sat) but the ‘growth’ I actually made was in myself and I can sit here a year or so on and finally feel pride in myself.
To be continued with the brain tumour is a great disaster that a human has to experience in his life. Your blog is inspirational to fight with cancer.
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