No it's not the title of a new book I am working on (I kind of wish it was, nearly nine months without working on my book is really beginning to get to me). It's a round up of what is going on in my life at the moment and why my postings are becoming even more irregular than normal.
Those of you who read 'Health Issues' from a couple of months back no doubt remember that my Mother was diagnosed with cancer. Having ignored the events since then to make my blog one of the places where I can get away from it all, I now feel that it is time to face up to the music and swallow it whole.
They cannot remove the initial tumour. It is just over the size into the 'too big' measurement and if they remove it now then they risk the cancer accelerating and spreading. Instead she had an operation at the beginning of this month that removed a large percentage of her lymph system in that arrive in the hopes that will create a 'road block' effect so that the cancer can't travel else where. Now we are staring down the long barrel of chemo and radio therapy starting on the 20th of May.
A trip to the hospital every day for five weeks. It doesn't sound much until you start putting the times down in the diary in ink and then you realise just how much this is going to be. It starts feeling a hell of a lot more real when you go through the appointment list and realise that for over a month you are going to spend most of your time either travelling to and from or in the hospital. You sit there and you look and you look and you look at it, the train of thought having reached the station and not going on. It is at times like these when I realise just how small my head bones are. I get a sense of just how easy it would be for something to get hold of my skull and crush my head in. Our brains are such delicate creations and we take it for granted that our skulls are strong enough to protect then.
I think the worst thing out of all of this is because we don't know how the chemo and radio therapy is going to take her. She could be one of the lucky ones, like her dad, my grandfather, who just had all the skin on his hands and his feet peel off. Or she could be one of the unlucky ones and we are looking at at least five weeks of the d and v, hallucinations and the feeling that napalm has just been poured through ever one of her bones.
There is also the worry about what this does to mine and my sister's chances of developing cancer in our lives. I would have said that we have a pretty good diet,thanks to my autism induced food allergies, we were fairly active as a family, none of us smoke, we only drink alcohol as a dinner accompaniment and we buy most of our food locally so we're not exposed (I don't think) to high levels of GM food. So how did this turn up?
Granted you have to factor in the one risk factor that Mother has that neither me or my sister has (thank God) - Mother's eldest brother is a paedophile and Mother wasn't his first victim. It is a known fact that woman who have been abused have a rate risk of developing this sort of cancer, something else they ought to think about when they do the sentencing of paedophiles and rapists. It ought to add at least ten years to the sentence because that's about a conservative average of what their abuse has taken of the lives of their victims. But there again, since when has the justice system ever truly listened to the voices of the victims in these cases?
As for my own health problem, I am getting sick and tired of having repeated eye infections.
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