September 2008



The things you find out
Posted September 18th, 2008 by Jane

Breast cancer: losing your breast, losing your hair but hey now losing your voice?
Well I quickly adjusted to living with one breast…more of that another day. I’ve lost my hair twice in 5 years for 16 long months this far, and its about to go for third time. I don’t like the wig but it does [...]

MORPHINE!
Posted September 19th, 2008 by Jane

I always liked my drugs. Aspirin for a headache, rennies for the indigestion, valium and mogadon in my rather wild early 20s…..then it felt a bit wrong in the days of consciousness raising groups and close reading of Our Bodies Ourselves but somehow I never quite got the hang of Bach flower remedies.
When my shoulder pain started…a nerve pain [...]

The language of chemotherapy:Part 1
Posted September 21st, 2008 by Jane

Alan Bennett wrote that he never felt matey enough with it to shorten it to chemo and I’ve got to feel the same. Chemo sounds like a child’s comic (chemo Beano) or a fizzy drink. OK maybe if you’re the kind of cancerperson who likes to visualise the stuff coursing through veins, searching out and ’mopping [...]

Choking
Posted September 21st, 2008 by Jane

I think a lot about how the cancer will finally kill me, dreading always dreading the particular ways of bone, brain, lungs or liver…the common sites of breast cancer secondaries…and what their unchecked progression will mean. When I got my ‘regional’ recurrence 18 months ago, written up often as a lesser kind of recurrence than ’secondaries’ [...]

 

Something unpleasant and me
Posted September 23rd, 2008 by Jane

Miriam Engelberg wrote a brilliant cartoon book called Cancer made me a Shallower Person. I only read it recently…her cartoons about breast cancer make me laugh out loud, particularly ‘Something Unpleasant and You’ where she takes a dig at those cheery medical pamphlets which describe gruesome treatments and procedures in a jolly positive way.
I’m shit [...]

 

Spaces of pleasure: cyber friends
Posted September 27th, 2008 by Jane

On Thursday I was among eight 40/50 something women lunching in central London together. We got there early and stayed late but otherwise you’d not have guessed we weren’t just another group of city office workers swapping anecdotes and jokes. We’d all met before in cyberspace, on a secondary breast cancer site; this the third [...]

 

How long am I going to live?
Posted September 30th, 2008 by Jane

I ponder this question quite a lot these days. And I really don’t know the answer. I’ve just completed my DLA application under the ‘Special Rules’. DLA is a non means tested benefit which terminally ill people can apply for under special rules..if we are not expected to live for more than another six months. Many people [...]