At a certain point it starts to dawn on you that in a few sentences everything you thought you new about who you are, were and might be is irrevocably changed. You either embrace it or resist it and some times it really pays to just go with the flow. It’s a cliche I know but shock, fear and circumstances zap your capacity to argue with cancer as it starts to change your life.
The main thing cancer has taught me is not to project and to wait and see what happens in every aspect of my life. Over the years you get hardened to the blood tests and the waiting for results merry go round. Prior to my diagnosis in 2008 I was not capable of being spontaneous, I was a planner, organiser, someone who would make things happen through sheer force of will. However that suit no longer fitted, it felt ungainly and inappropriate to the circumstances. I was thrown back into living intuitively. Cancer does not do certainty, cancer abides in the domain of the unknowable and as all good Buddhists will tell you the only ‘reliable thing in life is change’. So there I was pulverising life scripts, letting go of expectations and just trying to get through the next second and breathe.
I had gained a new chip to my identity block, that of the breast cancer patient. This had hardly sunk in, my partner was outside getting my Mum to collect my stepson so he could join me, while I waited for the specialist breast cancer nurse in a side room. I could see the pain in his face, he’d turned a fetching grey, ashen with shock. I was waiting alone with a well positioned box of tissues. I wanted to cry but I was currently too stunned to do much else but sit in dumb founded silence, waiting for someone to explain to me who I was about to become.
I was supposed to be getting ready to release an album, buying another house, getting married, making The Big Chill Label the best independent label on the planet and caring for my kids. This was not fair and it was not convenient, I had far too much to do. Having to accept loosing my fertility to stay alive was gradually sinking in. Small price to pay for being around I told myself and that was that, the thought of having another child over and done.
I had one birth child and three step children, that ought to be enough for anyone I told myself. It didn’t quell the sudden waves of horrified panic and grief bubbling away in my leaden feet, feet which curiously no longer seemed connected to my brain and body. What am I going to say to the children? I wondered through emerging tears, I’d promised them there was nothing to worry about. I ached for what they and I were about to go through and the person I no longer was to them and to myself, I’d lost my invincibility cloak and I had become a vulnerable broken human that needed healing. I genuinely didn’t know how to balance their and my sudden need for care.
*This blog is written to support #Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the Breast Cancer Haven who helped me beat beast cancer in 2008 and in 2011 – along with the incredible team on Worthing Hospital’s Breast Cancer Ward. I am blessed to be well today.
Donate to the Breast Cancer Haven Here
Eugenie Arrowsmith 