12/21/2023 0 Comments Snooze emoji![]() ![]() People telling me to “just rest” was amazingly soothing and an instruction I, as an unrehabilitated workaholic, was all too grateful to hear. I needed every possible way of trying to keep going. This scaffolding helped me to feel okay about being withdrawn or lying like a duvet-buried log. An important early family pledge set the tone for me: they were going to act on advice from a friend – which was that sometimes he’d been just too tired or in his own head to be able to deal with people – and would respect my wishes/need for space, etc as we went along. Meals, cakes, special goodies, chocs, handmade cancer hats, flowers, books: they came in a steady and incredibly sweet stream. The fourth silence – masking your travails via providing only chirpy soundbites. If it’s all just jolly beanies and smiles then you’re letting down all those who are dragging themselves desperately through each minute, hour, day, “off” – week. And that’s one of the reasons I’m writing this. At really critical times, friends tracked my situation through my family, by arrangement.īut I didn’t tell Facebook/social media much about the bad bits. I set the pace and the nature of comms via my outputs and my responses. Everyone completely left me alone if I didn’t reply, or used only an emoticon, or said I wasn’t up to a phone call. This set up a bunch of individual follow-ups and general amazing kindnesses. I used it quite a lot – NOT as a day-by-day diary, but for updates at intervals. Simple things like Facebook can help here. The third silence : not giving some kind of progress report. I’m kind of reclusive so I didn’t want a throng of people around, but I didn’t want to slide into the grey land of misty silence. So, you ask nothing and your very act of being silently/politely supportive takes you out of the support circle. And you’re weirdly wired to think you “don’t want to be any trouble”. ![]() You hear they’ve got it, you’re hugely sad (thinking the worst) and then after that… you don’t know what’s going on. Second, my decision to tell everyone was because of my frustration through the years about not knowing what was going on when we heard that someone had cancer. My cancer was aggressive but detected early. Break that second silence : tell people what’s hit you – especially if that might save them. That’s scores of women that I came across. I saw only one man in the radiation centre. Do it, ladies! The chemo treatment room only had two men in there – each only spotted once. I’m theorising that they told others who told others, etc. I’m happy to say that at least seven of my friends shot off for their overdue check-ups because of my broadcasting. Pap smear, Mammogram, Bone Density: all ticked. I had spent 2020 feeling rather smug in fact – that I’d got my check-ups done in February pre-Lockdown. Primarily it was a high-revs mission: get yourself off to the doctor for a check-up. Once the diagnosis was confirmed, and I told my friends, I had two very specific motivations. This is the parent in us: protect the children, absorb the load, put on a bright face, carry on. But I didn’t exactly tell them everything: I didn’t share the precise dimensions of the tumour detected in the scan and how different this was from “normal”. It was in stages and in different ways.Īfter the first alarming discovery by the gynaecologist and the need for a biopsy, I told my family. Right at the start, I decided I must tell everyone. Friends and relatives – what to say? What to do? And why certain words, meant in all kindness, are just too exhausting. But because I’ve been “there” myself I want to try to explain what it’s like all alone in your head and in treatment. Silence tackling: what to do? What’s it all about? I want to name the silences. But then more stuff happened and now it’s heading up for the next Christmas and I simply have to get the words down. I promised that I would write it when my treatment ended in November last year. I wanted to “give” when there was something there to give. I vowed to write something “later” – a tribute. I saw other people being kind and making things easier for newcomers. I engaged only, and then only in clipped words, with the staff. Maybe I looked awful and ancient and hopeless to others. Through all my Chemotherapy treatments I had abandoned my normal habits of talking to those around me.
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