Taking it each day as it comes and other cliches

One of the hardest things about having cancer is learning, or perhaps forcing yourself, to accept the situation. Like it or not (and to be clear, I don’t like it), I have reached the point where I think I now accept the reality of the position. I have cancer, I can’t at the moment be the person I once was and my future is uncertain. I hate it, but I accept it, and it feels as though that’s a big step forward.

It hurts of course. I’m writing this while watching the Tour de France and it is making me think about sun-soaked days riding up and down mountains, albeit in a style unrecognisable to any of those currently spending a few weeks cycling around France in pursuit of a famed yellow jersey. I miss my form of cycling very much, no matter how slow I am.

Meanwhile the family are out at a local festival with live bands: I can’t go because I am isolating before having a stem cell transplant next week. I miss hanging out with them, the best people in the world, at things like that.

Meanwhile I’ve been working on my FA courses so that I can become a coach to my son’s football team, but I have no idea when I will actually be able to start to help. I want to volunteer for a conservation project near where we live. I want to go back to work. I want to live life like I used to, and like most of you are able to. I want, I want, I want. I want to contemplate the new freedoms which are becoming more and more possible as the UK opens up. But I can’t.

But while I may sound, to me at least, like a spoilt toddler demanding another ice cream, on the whole I’m not bitter, and I do accept the way things currently are. I really was bitter a few weeks ago and I can’t promise not to feel bitter again. But I’m not at the moment. I accept my position as a reality I need to work with and try to navigate. I will go with the flow with curiosity and a degree of wonder. I will take each day as it comes. I will be as positive as I can be, but on my terms, not those which sometimes feel forced upon me and others with cancer. I will choose how positive I’m going to be (and my consultant assures me that there is no evidence to suggest that remaining relentlessly upbeat will scare the cancer off). And I will somehow deal with my very own new normal.

I’m expecting that my acceptance of things will be tested over the next few weeks. On Tuesday I will finally start the process of a stem cell transplant with a fresh round of chemotherapy. On Wednesday, my frozen stem cells will be defrosted and returned to me. And then we will see how it all goes. I’m going to be a daypatient at first, heading home every day after treatment. Then on day six, as the combination of stem cell activity and the impact of the chemotherapy go into overdrive I will be admitted to a ward. The view is that it’s at day 6 or so that things can get dicey with what will by then be a shattered immune system.

I want to get on with it, but I’m also nervous, and a bit scared. I’m likely to feel lousy, but I’m kind of used to that. Doing some of this as an outpatient feels counter-intuitive but I’m also just 20 mins from the hospital and hardly on my own at home.

Oddly I currently feel better than I have for months. The long haul of chemo which dragged me down for six months has worked, and while it will almost certainly come back thanks to the nature of myeloma, my latest blood test show my cancer markers as too low to quantify. The transplant is going to make me feel foul, and weak, and my hair, such as it is, will probably fall out. It feels odd to be going into hospital to make me feel worse than I do now.

The most difficult thing recently, though, has been the waiting. Waiting for a hospital bed, waiting at the same time for news of our (hopefully) imminent house move. Waiting for news of our car, which packed up one morning before a hospital appointment, went to the garage and has proved mysteriously beyond repair for almost a fortnight. When the dog swallowed an Oliver Bonas face mask last week and had to go to the vet at a cost of £100 or so, I almost lost patience with the world and all the waiting. And then my sons both excelled for their football teams and almost all was good again, and those moments are as precious as they come, something I realise now more than ever.

It’s kind of remarkable, to me at least, that cancer has made me see almost everything much more clearly than I ever have in my entire life. The sense of acceptance is crucial to that, and at its heart is a realisation of the choice I have: to accept it and deal with it as best I can, or to sink under the enormity of it all. Either approach, frankly, is acceptable. I think my current way is the best one for me. I will let you know how it goes.

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