Crikey! How long? Nearly six months? Is anyone still there?
Actually, I figured that maybe nobody was - I sort of got distracted and a week became a month...
Then last week someone said that they'd been checking for updates - and then I realised how long it had been.
It's been an interesting, and in many ways difficult few months. It seems flippant to gloss over a lot of it - it seems dismissive to say "Radiotherapy went well" and then no more. Maybe I will rattle on about it in a bit more detail later on. The hair started to come back - very grey - and then there was the difficult time when I decided I should do something about the greyness, tried, hated it and spent the next however long trying to get rid of the awful colour... it's fading now and I will just go grey disgracefully. Every time I look at hair dye now I remember the sick feeling when I looked in the mirror as it dried... so won't be doing that again in the forseeable future.
It seems incredibly bad to just say "I had my first six month checkup and it was fine" - but that's what happened. There was a little more to it than that, but again, I will bore you with a bit more detail later on. Bet you can't wait, huh?!
There were lots of other little challenges - when a really great sailing trip went horribly wrong in the last five minutes - with hindsight there were a few real comedy gems (no, honestly, when the tide goes out ALL the water goes away!), actually I will share that with you later... It's making me smile as I write, even though it was not exactly fun at the time.
Remind me to tell you about the job... yep, that's right, I am no longer a benefit-scrounging parasite, I actually am back to being a net financial contributer to this fine economy of ours! Thankfully I am home-based, so the commute isn't too difficult, I only have to go to be shouted at by the customer every once in a while, and my boss is in another country so all in all it's a pretty good gig! Fortunately the way it's working out means that when I have a knackered day or a depressed day I can still function well enough - which helps me build my strength and confidence, which has to be a good thing. A shouty customer was actually rather complimentary about me this week, so I feel quite nice about that.
Anyway, I have decided that although I don't want to spend the rest of my life defined by "the C-Word"*, it's going to be part of my life forever now, and I have to accept that. There was a phase when I was reluctant to talk about it for fear of becoming a "cancer bore"... but I don't see that I should hide it away any more than I think I should wear it on a t-shirt all the time. I guess that was part of the reason I stopped blogging - I did start to feel that my whole life had been focussed on cancer and it was time for that to change. However, now, a whole year down the line from that awful day, I want to change the outlook of this blog. I want it to move on, to a world where the new normal does involve living with the aftermath of breast cancer - but also involves getting up, going to work, and planning for the next fifty years of life. OK, maybe fifty is a bit ambitious, but you get the picture.
The work PC has just gone into power-save mode, so it's time I went and did some work for a while. But, like the Governator... I'll be back!
* The C-Word - sounds like a good title for a book. Perhaps I should write one... Oh. Someone already did. And it's rather good. So good I bought it. Doh!
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