Too Bad For You, Cancer—

I don’t just talk it, I walk it, and I walk all over Cancer with my Technicolor Doc Martens.

Of course, I had to make up for all the time I didn’t spend getting nervous in the two weeks before the appointment. So after all the tough talk in the preceding post, I had a twenty-four hour anxiety attack before a member of my oncologist’s medical team told me I still have my boot on Cancer’s neck.

The anxiety is all part of the ritual, along with the donning of the lucky t-shirt and getting take-out from Itsu afterwards.

Green bananas for everybody, till the last two weeks in September. In the meantime, rock it while you got it.

I Was So Busy…

For the last couple of months, I’ve been working on a new novelisation project on a short deadline (sorry, can’t tell you what it is yet). It has kept me so busy that I completely forgot to put tomorrow’s appointment with my oncologist on my calendar. Which means I forgot to get nervous about it. I forgot to stop buying green bananas on 16 May. I almost forgot to get a blood test today.

This is so weird––my awareness of having incurable, terminal cancer actually got pushed so far into the background of my life, I lost track of it altogether.

I got so busy, I beat cancer.

Beating cancer isn’t limited to going into remission or being cured. You beat cancer when you’re too busy living your life to let cancer be the most important thing in it.

In the beginning, it is. When you get that diagnosis, when you start chemo, your entire reality is made of cancer. Your whole life is reset in terms of having cancer. You have to figure out how to come to terms with it. You decide how to deal: fight it, dance with it, play chess with it and out-manoeuvre it––your life, your rules.

The act of doing all these things is living. Cancer might kill you in the end––but until it does, you’re alive.

I have cancer but cancer doesn’t have me. Cancer can only kill me because it can’t beat me.

Still, I really do have to be more careful about putting appointments with my oncologist on my calendar.