giving it some lols for cancer

 

This morning I tried to be normal and join in with something- it was the ‘secret’ breast cancer thing – yanno- you post ‘there’s a squirrel in my car’ or ‘I’m thinking of getting butt implants’ on social media and then anyone who comments or likes the post gets a jolly message about it being a big secret game for breast cancer awareness.

I hoped that joining in would make me feel a part of ‘something’ but almost immediately I regretted it and felt worse each time I passed on the ‘secret message’ by private memo until eventually I just went back and quietly deleted the original post…

Tomorrow is children in need day – which I also don’t join in with because my misgivings about it outweigh the enjoyment so many people seem to find in the dressing up, having fun and ‘joining in’ malarky…. we’ve just had ‘poppy day’ too …at which I head against the perceived wisdom year after year by wearing a white poppy and not supporting our present day troops and I don’t join in and buy the annual ‘song’ or collectables made from genuine WW1 shellcases.

It’s not that I’m a grumpy ‘not joining in’er’…I’m just deeply suspicious of mass events based on a moral standpoint of some sort….like ‘think of the children’. That phrase always reminds me that the government actually don’t give a flying fuck about children – if they did child poverty would trump paying for wars every time. It’s not just government…they pass the onus of caring on to  massive charities  and these behemoths seem more about maintaining their own positions than the thing they are supposed to be fighting for.

I’m aware that I over-think things sometimes…. but this morning I thought for once I’d let go and run with the populist flow and actually….it very soon felt like poo….

Maybe it’s partly because I’ve had cancer (an atypical non hodgkins lymphoma attached to my colon – seeing as you’re asking) and being all jolly and secret about it in a ‘ lols and haha’ sort of way feels like a betrayal of the days I spent in agony vomiting on the floor, having intrathecal needles stuck into my spine, being too ill to spend a whole christmas day at home, shitting myself, shooting stomach acid out of my nose through a tube etc etc etc…

…it felt so very wrong, for me, to treat cancer in a way that makes it feel in any way trivial.

If you enjoy the whole joining in with charidee ‘events’ thing…carry on…. but I’ve just had a short, sharp reminder that its seriously not my thing.

a boob and a shit head

You may have to click on the image to be able to read it.

The image above is taken from the Facebook saffronwaldenboobiebellion page that I caught sight of over Al’s shoulder last night.
In case you can’t be bothered clicking the link – a woman suffering from breast cancer and under going chemo therapy goes to her local Tesco in Saffron Walden wearing a hat that looks like a breast…I imagine it’s like one of the pro-breastfeeding ones that have been doing the rounds of social network lately. She was wearing it to raise awareness of breast cancer in the hope that people may approach her and ask why she was wearing such an item.

What she probably wasn’t counting on was another woman telling her she ‘found it offensive’ and when it’s purpose was explained the offended party butted in and told the wearer that ‘maybe she should stay at home until she stopped looking like a sick freak’.

Understandably the wearer ended up in tears and went home her positivity shattered.

Totally shit.

It takes guts and gumption of so many kinds to step out of your house when you have cancer… not least because you’ve lost your hair and need to wear something to cover the baldness – but also because much of the time on chemo you feel like seven shades of shite and are susceptible to all manner of infections as your immune system is destroyed by the poison pumped into your system to kill the cancer.

Your body no longer feels your own, your own body has attacked itself for an unknown reason and is then attacked again by the medical profession… literally a war is being waged at cellular level and all you can do is ride the wave or die..and sometimes that’s AND die.

Maintaining any level of positivity is a test of sheer bloody mindedness and the fact that the woman in question wanted to use her own experience to help raise other peoples awareness is laudable… quite often ones sole urge is to just get your head down and get through it.

I’ve no message for the woman who found a hat so offensive… she wouldn’t read my blog anyway.

But what you can do is donate some money to a cancer charity today. (Obviously breast cancer is what this story is all about but breast cancer actually gets more than its fair share of publicity) – how about something for colorectal cancer, the second and third most common cancer in women and men respectively…and the fourth most common cause of death by cancer.

But it’s one people don’t like to talk about as it involves poo and bums and dark back passages.

Maybe I’ll knit myself a great big turd hat and go to Saffron Walden Tescos.

NB. my own cancer was a non-hodkins lymphoma which is fairly uncommon but breast cancer and bowel cancer are two of the most common cancers and as I said above one of them gets far less publicity than the other.