The Happy Smiling Cancer Girl

I turn 30 this week… I find it a little surreal. 9 months ago I couldn’t see myself getting to this point. Not because I didn’t think I’d be alive to see it but because your life get puts on hold and you just can’t see the future.

I’ve been a bit quiet since getting my latest results. I couldn’t trust my emotions for a while, and describe how I actually felt. It’s a bizzare feeling getting declared no evidence of disease. You would think it’s all happiness and good vibes but in reality it’s just as emotional and soul destroying as the bad news.

You’re probably wondering how.

Well my first thought after getting my good news was “well what was the fucking point of all that?”

For the last 18 months my life has been thrown inside out and has been destroyed. Anything previous that I had achieved became meaningless. Forever more my life will be tainted by this stupid fucking disease.

So yes, although I breathed a sigh of relief, and I am at a point that I dreamed I would never reach, I can’t help being pissed.

I will still be living my life in 3-month periods and this will probably be like this for a while until (if it gets that far) I’m clear for a while then it’ll go to 6 months, 1 year and so on.

My oncologists doesn’t want to expose me too much to CT scans and such. I’ve had a hell of a lot of exposure to it already and there is just no knowing what I will need in the future. So at the moment, I’m rotating between chest x-rays and CT scans.

Chest x-rays because they expect it to come back there first. Basically where the tumour on the left lung was, the tumour they never treated with radiotherapy because it was too small, they never actually expected it to go with chemotherapy alone. So my lungs are a weak point.

If I think too hard about it all it really does terrify me what my future may hold. It’s so bloody aggressive when it starts growing. I mean for crying out loud I never even felt any symptoms when it started on my lungs!! How are you meant to be prepared for something that you can’t feel exists?

I asked my oncologists if I could have monthly blood tests or something to detect if it’s active again. Just my luck my cancer doesn’t show up in the blood results.

For fuck’s sake! So what do I do?

I live.

I can’t stress over something that I don’t know what will happen.

I feel like I should be. I feel like that if it was anyone else they would be freaking the fuck out over it all but I’m just not. I mean don’t get me wrong, I do have the odd moment of “what the heck” but it’s not often. It’s the usual little late night niggles when you don’t drop of to sleep straight away.

Post traumatic stress disorder is pretty common apparently in cancer survivors. But honestly… I don’t really feel like a survivor. I haven’t survived this. It’s just been put on hold. I’ve not got “the all clear” that everyone talks of and there will be none of this “5 year all clear” stuff. It’s just inactive right now…. Well for all I know it could already be growing again! But I’m not thinking like that… All the time.

It’s hard not to feel like a grenade with the pin out! At any point I could go off and life will be chaos again!

So my what’s next for 30, chapter?

Well I want to use this to my advantage. Believe it or not I have a lot of cancer knowledge under my belt! It’s been a full time job with fuck all to show for it but my life!

I’m never gonna be a millionaire as cancer screws with the finances and your financial security but really… What’s the point in saving for when I’m 80? There’s no guarantee any of us are gonna make it that far, cancer or no cancer!

But whatever way I go out of this world, I wanna be happy with what I have achieved. Cancer is no party, and if I can help one person make their day a bit brighter when going through treatment or after treatment, then I’ve achieved what I set out to do.

I’m not gonna stop my blog. I still enjoy it and there’s still a fair bit of recovery to do. It will also link quite nicely with my next chapter in life.

Life goes on.

(Oh and if you haven’t seen my Instagram page yet, just an update: the curls are WILD!)

This post originally appeared on Happy Smiling Cancer Girl on June 18, 2018. It is republished with permission.