The long night

After the dr, we went for a drink in a bar and I called my friend V asking her to look after the kids during my appointment on Saturday.  There is nobody else around - it's August.  Luckily she'd just come back from her holidays and said come round now or I can come to you.  She was the first person I had told.

We ended up drinking lots of tequila and eating pizza whilst the kids had a ball together.  We listened to how fantastic their holiday was and it was good to have some normal funny conversation.  We talked about the cancer eventually.  V's dh, A, had had a tumor taken from his lung area so he kind of knew what was going on.  V, however, explained that her Dad had died from cancer, and many other people she knew.  She was pretty hard about the whole thing which upset me later.  She said so what if I have to take pills for the rest of my life, so what, there are people who have to do kidney dialysis for the rest of their life, I should count myself lucky, I have contracted the 'best' kind of cancer.  Being as her Dad died not so long ago from a strange cancer, I think this informed what she said.  Everyone has a take on it informed by their own personal experiences.

Something she did say was that there is no standard about cancer, it is particular to the person and you can't compare yours with anybody elses and you can't know how yours will react until you know, nothing is able to be predicted in advance.  This rings more and more true to me.

As I have been telling more people about my illness, they all have stories of people they have known, people who are dead or cured or living with.  I know they tell me those stories to make me feel better and reassured and to an extent it does reassure, but it is so personal and you are so individual, whatever happens will be different from other people.  If you have a broken leg, you have a plaster, you get physio and it gets better usually.  Cancer is not like this, it is unpredictable, sneaky, malicious and quiet as fox in the snow.  It reminded me of this poem The Thought Fox by Ted Hughes that we studied at school

http://www.poemhunter.com/best-poems/ted-hughes/the-thought-fox/

It was a long night.  I slept fitfully on the sofa at 5am finally.  I just played stupid games on the ipad and looked at cancer sites again and again, trying to find news - hopefully good, but whatever.  I did contemplate killing myself it has to be said, but I didn't really want to.  I was pretty low.