Breakfast With An Old Friend

 When you have Cancer, it can be a lonely journey.  By that I mean that even with the support of friends and family, no one really "gets it".  Many want to try and help but their "How are you?" question is really, more like "Oh God, you've got Cancer. Are you going to die?"   which is why I bought my Monty Python Tee Shirt with the words "I'm Not Dead Yet!" on it.

Everyone means well but the internal horrors of what it does to your head and the actual horrors of what it does to your body and the blitzkrieg that is the surgery and treatment are far from their minds when you respond.  In fact, it is more likely that you do, what I did and end up reassuring people that you are alright and more importantly that they are alright because they are SO uncomfortable and just want to know that you aren't going to die.  That's the bottom line I think.

So, my friend and I had similar but not identical Cancers and we were both in surgery at the same time and we were both recovering and not saying much to the wider world.  Our shared experience meant that we came together to work on a project after we had recovered and we remain in touch and I think we are "strange bedfellows" as we have business and cancer connections but we aren't particularly friends who go out together for much more than the occasional beer, curry or, like today, breakfast and we chat through things.

We both have  our head struggles and we are both quite different from normal people.  Sounds bizarre I know, but what I mean is that we are both "scientist" type personalities.  We were both heavily involved in an industry of absolutes. So what on earth does that mean?  We both worked on facts, data and right and wrong, yes or no, real world information and objectives and outcomes.   Neither of us dealt with or accepted bullsh1t as that in itself would not get the projects done.  Chancers and idiots could not be tolerated.  In my early days, I was trained to not kill people because every action I did could indeed do that.  If I had wired up a system incorrectly, it could easily do that and I carried this through in all my work.  If you mess something up it can have repercussions, maybe not terminal but certainly it could affect many people in different ways.

So we both have minds that question everything, challenge accepted thinking etc because it wa our job and what we do.  So we click on many things and whilst we are similar, we work in different ways and like different things but our bullsh1t detectors and spider senses are almost identical.  We may not produce identical strategies but we tend to arrive at the same conclusions. 

It's good to get out together and chew over the cud so to speak.  We probably tackle politics, head stuff, meaning of life, emptying the mind of lots of stuff and so on.  We agree on much but have differing views and approaches about it.  It's refreshing and we both normally come away feeling a lot better.  It is interesting how we can be up or down at the time too.  This time I was all calm and clear where previously it may have been the other way.  

Anyway, it was good to talk and nice to meet up and I ought to do it more.