Electric eels

Evening to you all :) I'm in a very unusual for Constanze pensive mood this evening and thought I'd ramble about feelings and serious things instead of steak and cheese. Maybe I do have a deep side buried somewhere down near me kidneys. Who knows?

I think I'm a little nervous about how to approach the whole cancer issue in the real world. I'm really not very good at fully conveying my feelings toward cancer, I genuinely am quite amused by it all. I'm aprehensive that it'll be like when I was first diagnosed and I'll have a sea of people telling me how awful it all must be and that's really not the case. I'm just not looking forward to being at interviews and having the crap patronised out of me by people who don't know what the hell they're talking about, everyone has a different reaction to cancer, some people hate the hell out of it, for me it's just been a hilarious rollercoaster. Sometimes I feel the need to drop to my knees and beg people to believe that I'm actually really completely fine with it. I get it constantly and I will admit, it drives me a bit bonkers, the constant expectation that I'll be completely miserable about everything that's happened. I wouldn't swap my cancer for the world, it's made me into the excellent ball of supercool that I am today, you don't get to pole dance with drips stands anywhere else in the universe!

I guess it has been a constant theme with my illness, people either presume they know what you're feeling when the truth really couldn't be more far from that. It's a terrible cliché but until you too have had cancer none of these things will ever really make sense. You're torn because everyone does everything with your best interest in mind, they try to say the right things and do the right things when all you really want is for the illness to not be a big deal. Which it really isn't. Thousands of people get cancer. You feel a bit poorly and lose your hair. Then you get better or die. It's how the world works.

I'm really not sure how being ill came so easily to me. I frequently feel guilty when I see people on the ward that obviously aren't coping with it very well at all. Maybe there is something in my head that isn't wired up right. Maybe it's the fact that I realised very quickly that one day it would all be over and life would go on as normal. That or I'd die, and if I was dead I'd be dead so I doubt I'd do very much caring. There are always a few moments in your life that define everything and you and your life and everything some more, I remember being sat in that hospital bed surrounded by doctors and nurses and being told I had cancer. I wasn't devastated, my head was just whirling with the massive changes that were about to happen. I think about a day about two years ago when I got a text message that smashed four years of love's young dream and words can't describe how I felt. I sound overly poetic when I say it but I've lost far more organs to love than I have to cancer and I imagine that's the case for most people. You don't hear any dramatic ballads about bone marrow extractions, now do you?

Perhaps in the real world I'll have to be more assertive with what I can and can't do if I get some sort of job. Over the past three years I've let myself get into far too many situations where I don't make it completely clear just how ill I am, both trivial and serious. I walk around in my high heels with my dopey smile and con everyone into thinking I'm a picture of health and inside there's this little old lady crawling along the floor. There's a lot of mind over matter, I do push myself to my limits but when I'm sat in a puddle on the floor of a tube station I realise that maybe I do overdo it sometimes. Still, it beats lying in bed.

But then I think sometimes this extreme lack of willingness to give up a normal life has been beneficial. Ploughing on through seems to have served me very well. Like when I started going out with the current boyfriend, I really really really did not want to go out with anyone until I was completely completely completely better, as we all know I've been out with a few people since I became ill and all those relationships tended to end because of the constant conflict between my brain and my body and I was just sick of being this knackered cancery unsexy country trekking zombie. At first it was horrendously hard, just like all the other ridiculous long distance things I seem to get into but now as I'm getting better and better everything doesn't seem to be quite as bad. Stubborness. That's the key to getting over cancer.

I think these are all reasons why I've always hated being called 'brave'. To me being brave is a choice, if you see a bear mauling a whale and you hit it with a plank of wood then that's brave. I didn't choose to get cancer, the only choice I made was to not curl up in a ball and die, and that's really not brave, that's just sensible. All I do is sit on my arse in hospitals. I could be fighting in Afghanistan and people think that lying in bed having my blood pressure taken is brave? Give me a break, haha :)

So yeah, this evening has been a strange mix of pensiveness and quiet optimism. We still don't have any running drinking water so I've spent the day drinking weird concoctions of liquids that I found in the back of the fridge, that might explain all these thoughts. Lots of Powerhorse, Kubus, Russian vodka and Yazoo. Not all at once, I'm not that mental! Sleepytimes now though, I have to go to the doctors at the crack of dawn or the world will implode :)

Constanze :) xXxXx