ITS CHRISTMAS! Ok it’s November, but we’ve past guy faulks night and so Christmas is officially approaching: the aisles are full of seasonal produce, the schools are rehearsing nativities, the PTA are organising the Christmas fair, relatives are asking for present ideas, the charities have started their Christmas appeals; Christmas is all around. I love Christmas, I’ve always loved Christmas, I get excited just thinking about it. This year, however, I’m one of those people for whom Christmas is tinged with a memory of sadness.
Christmas is my cancerversary.
”What’s a cancerversary?” I hear you ask.
A cancerversary is the anniversary of a significant date in your cancer journey. It’s a word used a lot in the cancer forums and can be any date that is meaningful to you: diagnosis day, surgery day, end of treatment day. My cancerversary is the day I discovered my lump, the 27th December. It was 10pm at night, I was undressing in my parents spare room after Christmas Day part 2 and I saw a dimple on my breast in the full length mirror. I remember the way my mind raced; the way my breast looked as I rotated my shoulders back and forth for a better view; the way my breathing seemed to stop as I groped around feeling for a lump; and the way my heart sank when I finally found one. I remember talking to Dave until two in the morning; was there a way to escape my parent‘s house, without burdening them with this truth? We decided there wasn’t. I remember the look on my parent’s faces the next morning and the massive queue at the walk in clinic. I remember the children’s disappointment and confusion when we told them we were leaving early because the clinic doctor couldn’t help and mummy needed to see her own doctor. I remember the long 5 hour drive home and the urgent phone calls I made to my GP enroute. I remember the look on my doctors face when she examined me and the paralysing fear I felt felt when she gave me an urgent 2 week referral to the breast clinic. I remember the utterly impossible task of starting my new teaching job the following week, while waiting for that appointment and the subsequent results to come through. I remember colleagues and friends reassuring me that it’s usually nothing and thinking, you didn’t see the GP’s face.
I’m usually rubbish at remembering dates, but during those early weeks, I was asked over and over again, “when did you first notice symptoms?”, and so the answer became etched into my memory. I once heard the week between Christmas and New Years Eve described as the “no man’s land” of the Christmas season; a space in time that sits between the year that went before and the year that is yet to come; a time when everybody mooches around with no concept of what day it is; a time when nothing much happens. Last year though, during this wierd period of nothingness, everything happened; I found a lump and in an instant everything changed. December 27th divides my life into, life before cancer and life after cancer.
It is no wonder then, as this year’s Christmas season approaches, I’ve had some emotional moments. I’ve been reminiscing about last year when I was excitedly looking forward to Christmas, completely oblivious to what lay ahead. I’ve been reminiscing about the carefree parties and outfits, the visits to Santa and the pantomime. I’ve been remembering what life felt like before I got cancer and then I’ve been remembering my whole cancer journey. I’ve been reflecting on a year of change: changes in my appearance, my health, my outlook and my relationships. There have been tears these last few weeks as I’ve reminisced, quite a lot of tears actually, and sometimes I didn’t even know what the tears were for. I found myself scrolling through a year of photographs on my phone, it helped me to take in and process the enormity of changes this year past has brought. I allowed myself to relive my journey from finding the lump, through treatment and recovery, and then I understood my tears. Tears are a release valve, and I have a huge amount of emotions to release. Joy makes me cry, hope makes me cry, sadness makes me cry, fear makes me cry and now that Christmas has taken on an additional significance, Christmas makes me cry.
I love Christmas and I’m really looking forward to spending it with my family up North this year. (Hopefully we’ll get to stay more than two days this time!) I am, however, a little worried about the tears. I come from a family of tough Geordies who don’t readily show or share their emotions and they seem to feel uncomfortable when I share mine. I don’t want to spend Christmas hiding in the toilets, but the likelihood of me making it through this year‘s celebrations without shedding a tear is fairly remote. Who knows though, maybe this year isn’t done with changes yet, maybe this will be the year that my family come to embrace all the feels?!
Ho ho ho. 🎄
And here it is... my journey from December 2017 to November 2018... it’s been quite the year!