Regurgition

OK, so I realise that last post was a bit obscure, but I don't know how much medical detail you want. In a nutshell, I'm on Tamoxifen, which gobbles up the oestrogen in my body which might otherwise go and feed any sneaky lingering cancer cells. Yay, Tamoxifen. Great job. I sometimes visualise it whizzing around my bloodsteam and lymphatic system, looking for little particles of oestrogen, and snatching them away from under the nose of a sole mutant cancer cell. But one of the side effects of Tamoxifen is that it causes the lining of the uterus to thicken. Not so yay, because that raises your percentage chance of developing endometrial cancer. Not by very much. But a little. So that's why, if you're on Tamoxifen, they like to go scanning and poking around to make sure your misbehaving old uterus isn't harbouring anything that shouldn't be growing there.

When you've been through cancer, you have no "it's probably nothing" hidey-hole. Because you know it probably isn't anything, but it might be. So you have to find new ways of dealing with daily life, while waiting for the next event (investigative procedure in Feb, and 3-4 week wait for results, since you asked).

Sometimes I feel I'm not very good at life. Do you ever feel that? That's not a very helpful way of looking at it, is it? I mean, it's not a competition, or an exam. You can't take a course in "Life: how to deal with its ups and downs" and then get an A or a B. There's not a correct way of going through these kinds of things, is there? There's not a correct way of going through anything, come to think of it.

I used to find it helped to write, so, well, I guess I'll do some of that.

This is what my morning was like. At breakfast, we told the boys that they were going to have to pay for the Xbox Live payment of $99.99 that has been automatically deducted from our credit card. No doubt, at some point in the past, we had a conversation about "if you sign up for this, you have to make absolutely sure that it's not a recurring payment" etc etc, but of course that conversation is long forgotten. They weren't too impressed with our assertion that this is an excellent life lesson for them, that adult life is FULL of having to negotiate your way through systems that you sign up for, that bleed you at any opportunity, and that learning the consequences painfully now will prepare them well for the future. I have a nasty feeling that Husband bestowed the following wisdom on one of them: "This is what life is like; suck it up, kid".

Somehow, the Xbox Live payment conversation segued seamlessly into a voluble expression of my dissatisfaction with the state of their bedroom floors. It seemed logical to me at the time.

12-yo had to be in formal wear (love that kilt), because it's the Burns Supper tonight. This involved a lot of running around, ending in me saying something along the lines of "I've just remembered that last time you wore formal wear, we agreed we'd look it all out the night before, and get up 10 minutes earlier". Great moment to recall that particular jewel of wisdom.

And that is why I HATE the whole cancer journey. Actually, it's the second reason I hate the whole cancer journey. The first reason is that everyone refers to it as a journey, which is a horrible cliche. The second is that it spills over into the whole of life, so that even if you do what you practised with your nice therapist, over months, and acknowledge the anxiety and nervousness and all the other emotions that you're feeling, they still spill over into your everyday life, and you end up giving one of your children a really hard time about a missing kilt pin.

As I was walking the two younger ones to school, I announced that we'd all had a bad morning, and that therefore, I was declaring that today, 24th January, is officially National Rubbish Day. (Except I think I used the word Cr*p.) Every year, we will celebrate National Rubbish Day (Cr*p Day). 12-yo was horrified. "It might be someone's birthday. It must be someone's birthday. That's not very nice for them." I pointed out that our wedding anniversary, 27th January, has become Holocaust Memorial Day, and that's not very nice for us. Life isn't fair. (I may have used that "suck it up" phrase again.)

Which reminds me, it IS our anniversary on Sunday, and I've booked cinema tickets on Saturday night to go and see Les Miserables. Not only is it meant to be a very good film, but I thought it would give me a good opportunity to have a cathartic cry in a dark place. I'll be the one saying on the way out "Poverty? Starvation? Revolution? Imprisonment? Betrayal? Death? I can't believe they made such a fuss about it. I mean, this week, I've been dealing with a LOST KILT PIN."

I'm going to stop writing now.

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