How are you getting on now?

Met a lot of friends last night and each ask how I'm getting along and I noticed that the ones that "would" be interested I could tell them a bit more about what was going on and the other ones I could just tell them that things were OK, I was cancer free and that they were keeping me on medication and observation (that's almost true and enough information to be getting on with).

Steve Kelley puts a very good point here that there tends to be two reactions to people who have cancer and - uncomfortable as this is - they are:

1) You are going to die. Just a matter of how soon and how awful the process.OR
2) It's been removed and won't come back and really the whole thing is over and can be forgotten about.

These would be reactions from people who have never had cancer or don't understand some of the ongoing issues with it.

It is a sort of binary thing, you're ill or you're not. Of course, if this blog and Steve's blog say nothing else it is that the disease itself has far reaching affects on your life and with Bladder Cancer, which is treatable it can come back, it is like that and the biggest threat we live with is every time we go to have an operation or get checked is the worry that it is back. Again, you can treat that, although the thought of having a neobladder or a bag to go pee in for the rest of my life isn't high up on my list of things to do before I die.

It isn't, cut, cut, snip, snip all over and done with, it isn't a cold and that was what amused me last night. Very few people are as clued up about cancer as those who actually have it. I was surprised to find people who have it, although I don't talk to many of them, don't really have a clue about their Bladder Cancer, a lot of people take it all in their stride and get told that they are having this or that and go off and have the treatment and yet probably haven't read up about how it works, what it does, ways to alleviate side effects and so on. I wanted to know everything about it.

So back to the point - 90% of the people at the meeting last night only really wanted to hear that I was OK, over the worst, on the mend, doing well. 10% were interested in the ongoing but, frankly, there aren't many who would be interested in the detail - who would?

If I was to be really cruel - I can recount the stories of the Flexi or the BCG treatments - only a very few of my friends know about the grizzly bits. But it is fun occasionally to drop in a bit about having the BCG and how they instill it with a catheter with no local anaesthetic. You can see the guys curling up, going to grab their groins and going "urggghh" and pulling faces. I do stop it there though as if I were there I couldn't listen to what was going on. Amazing what you put up with and amazing what people don't know.