Monday 8 December 2008

faces

Sunday 30th November

Wow – I was looking through old photos today [thanks to the Facebook for Good video] and I got quite depressed and tearful. Not their fault obviously, but it’s looking back that’s the problem. Maybe we shouldn’t. Look back. Looking back at the face I think of as ‘mine’ was a bad idea. The face surrounded by lots of hair. The face without Bells Palsy – the face before all this BS cancer stuff happened – and to think I was complaining then!! The old face I had was actually rather a nice one actually. Ah vanity vanity...

Now I would be so happy to have a face without the synkinesis, a face before the exhaustion of cancer. A face that has loads of hair around it [as averse to ON it!]. I know that eventually my hair will grow back. Yes, yes...I know that eventually the hair that’s on my face right now will disappear. But. I wonder if my self confidence will ever grow back to the same extent. At the moment it certainly doesn’t feel like it. Today anyway.

Had a bad evening for sure. There’s times of the day that things are just too much – why is that? What are we? Products of our minds or mad emotional elements? What happens to our minds after something like cancer attacks us? We are never the same after. Of course not – memory is cruel, we recall ourselves differently than we actually are now. We wish for the past person – why? Shouldn’t we just accept the new person we are?? Well, maybe. But that’s SO hard!!

Everyone in my position wants to be the person they were before the cancer happened. But sometimes we are a better person after cancer – simply because we notice more. We see more clearly. We are more understanding, and more emphatic. We make more time now for people that need to talk. Maybe we are more sane. After cancer, that’s an amusing thought, as we all have totally crazy moments. But with regard to what’s important – well, I’d say definitely we’re saner. I am anyway. In some respects.

Isn’t this how we should always be anyway? Open minded, understanding, thoughtful? But we aren’t usually. We charge through life making assumptions and forgetting what should be important. So, get this! In some ways I am GLAD I had cancer. It has allowed me to see more clearly – the real things that are going on around me, the people who have no Prada bags, no Armani watches...the people who have real values.

But it also seems that since having cancer there aren’t so many easy days; there’s always a worry in the back of the mind like a nasty little rat. Not too many nights where you just sleep all the way through without waking up and thinking. That gnawing away at the back of the brain. Wonder if there’s a Paracetamol that includes rat poison?

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