Wednesday, November 01, 2006

Actually you ARE ill you idiot

Gulp. I don’t think I have been trying to ignore the fact that I am ill or feel that I have been in denial about it. What I probably haven’t grasped is the gravity of the disease.

Generally, I don’t feel ill. I don’t look ill. I don’t act ill (I act a little more strangely perhaps). I take things easy and I don’t act quite like I used to I suppose and of course I can’t work as well as I used to.
However, it has never really occurred to me that this was “Serious” in that way. I was told I had Cancer, I had an operation days later and a few months after that another operation. Uncomfortable, knew something had been done etc.

I think I expected it to be like other things you get – you get cured you think no more of it and you go back to work. Wrong, not with this little beauty you don’t! It can recur and with quite alarming regularity. You can carry on having tumours taken out for quite a while and you can carry on having treatment and being seen and observed for the rest of your natural by the looks of things.

So – still do I feel ill? No.

Then the consultant explained which way “up” was to me. Untreated this is a significant threat to you – and they meant life – you can tell. “As it is, we are taking no chances with you” – yikes (as Scooby would say)! Still it hasn’t sunk in. I think I should be a lot more worried about this than I am. I wonder if that is what people’s expectations of me are. Perhaps you are meant to walk around all “doom and gloom”?

But, it was realising that things like Critical Illness cover kicks in and that possibly, I won’t be the best insurance risk in the future that has started me thinking, albeit only in the past week or so, that this really is a disease I need to take seriously or to feel more worried about or perhaps.

When do you take it seriously? Is Cancer – the word – something that you worry about? I don’t profess to know the answers just yet but it is an interesting and eventful journey. This blog alone has opened up so many ideas and opportunities from something that many people (who have experience of Cancer but only as a bystander) consider to be a terminal disease. Yet I have found out that it doesn’t need to be. I’m young (by my own standards) I can actually defeat this if I work at it. If I can’t defeat it, modern medicine can control this and strangely I will probably die from some other cause totally different to this one!