100. One hundred blog posts about living with breast cancer

I suppose we all like a milestone, even if it's an artificial one. Is life at 50-plus-one-day so very different from the life at 50-minus-one-day? Is your outlook on the 1st of January different from the one on 31st December? Just asking.

Is blog post number 100 any different from number 23, 67 or 89?

Yet it's a milestone for me.

Perhaps because it coincides with the first steps on Recovery Road, a road going Down the mountain rather than Up the mountain. Having reached the top at last, it's time to stop and stare perhaps, taking in the new vista.

(Vista: a pleasing view; a mental view of a succession of remembered or anticipated events.)

This one hundredth blog post feels a bit like the flag planted on my mountain top, look here folks, done it, made it, been there. I know I'm not the only one, there's a veritable FOREST of flags where I'm standing, but still, it's my very own hand-crafted, hand-carried, hand-planted flag, and I've got the scars to prove it.

But I'm not going back down the way I came. I'm going to come down on the other side of my mountain, leaving that treacherous Cancer Road out of view.

A big part of me wants to leave this blog behind as well, along with Cancer Road.

Out of view, out of mind. Onwards.

I am glad I wrote it. It has kept me sane, enabling me to step outside myself. When things were particularly bleak, I would be composing the words in my head: Ha! wait until I describe this particular little horror. Knowing, at the very same time, that there would be another blog post later on, one that said OK, that's over now. Next!

Crucially, blogging also kept me connected to the outside world. Friends and acquaintances and even strangers sending me supportive vibes through my iPad, even when I couldn't move beyond bed and sofa. There is a lot to be said for modern technology. I cannot describe in words what it was like to feel that others were thinking of me; to know that they were interested enough in my tales of woe to keep reading.

Even now that I'm done with the treatments and have gone back to work, I meet people I hardly know (distant work colleagues, say) who tell me that they've read everything, right from the start.

This has the bizarre but rather nice effect of feeling like I've got a whole new set of friends out there. Because if you've listened to me banging on about being breastless/hairless/defenseless/helpless, and you've stayed with me even during the grimmest, most tear-filled of days, then you're a friend, right? It's a bit one-sided of course, but interestingly, I have noticed that people who used to be mere acquaintances, or even strangers, seem to open up more. I suppose if I can tell them about being breastless/hairless/etc, then they can tell me about their life as well.

 

So it's been good, all this blogging. But isn't one hundred posts quite enough of a bad thing?

No, apparently not.

Now that having cancer is no longer my full-time job, people are giving me hints.

• You'll have to find something else to blog about! (As if it was the blogging that was my primary objective, rather than the specifics of coping with my verbal cancer diarrhoea.)
• Don't stop blogging! I'm going to have withdrawal symptoms!
• What are you going to DO with your blog? (This in an expectant sort of voice that leaves no room for the "nothing" response.)
• When is the book coming out?

So, here is my answer. I will carry on blogging, but ONLY about things related to being a recovering breast cancer patient.

Reflections on what it was like, looking back. It's quite amazing how things look quite different when they are behind you. I mean, who knew that going back to work in-between treatments, the stop-and-start approach, was just madness? At the time, getting a sick note for the entire ten months just seemed feeble; now, I think: Get a grip! Of course it doesn't count as skiving if you sign off from the day job for the duration of all these gruelling treatments! Actually, it seems that you all knew this, and told me so at the time, but I didn't believe it.

Snippets of memories that might be interesting or entertaining, but never made the blog. Ah, I can think of a whole stack of them.

I'm also wondering whether I ought to go back to the very first three months following the discovery of my breast lump, before I started blogging. I read back through my diaries recently and was shocked at how utterly floored I was by it all - I have genuinely forgotten all of that. Pouring that all over the internet would have felt far too scary at the time, but now that I have safely emerged at the top of the mountain, I wonder whether it's worth releasing? What do you think?

Reports of the journey down Recovery Road. Because it's not over, of course. I may think it is, I may pretend it is, but it's not. I am feeling genuinely happy and on top of the world (well, perhaps not the whole world, but on top of the mountain, definitely), but physically, I'm still struggling. This week, I worked quite solidly for four days (sooooo excited about being able to finish a task I've tried to do for the past year, but never quite managed, because of the stop-and-start problem), but on day five, when I had planned to do just a little bit more on that task, or perhaps go for a very long walk, I simply collapsed into bed. All day. And I haven't quite emerged from that spell of exhaustion.

The Take-each-day-as-it-comes lesson was one of the hardest to learn and the easiest to forget.

Comments on cancer-related news items. Have you noticed how cancer is in the news all the time these days? Is it just me, or was it always thus? (There was another one on the BBC this morning, a celebrity "coming out" as a breast cancer patient. I'm glad I'm not famous. I would be horrified if my getting-through-each-day was described on the radio as a Cancer Battle, as if an ability to "fight and win" would be my own personal virtue, and dying would, presumably, be a result of my own deficiency as a warrior. Ah, I could go on.)

One thing I am not at all sure about is your suggestions of publishing a book.

Those are flattering suggestions of course, but every author must ask herself: why? who for?

I'd be interested in your answers to those questions. I can think of some myself (didn't I start this blog partly because I thought Owl was such a marvellous addition to our family, he was worth sharing?) But for now, I am shelving the book idea - mostly because my daughters cannot think of anything much worse than a mother blogging about things that mothers should very well keep quiet about, posting pictures of bald heads and private pigs in the process. There's not much point in publishing a book if you're not going to promote it, but I haven't quite resolved the tension between wanting to share my cancer-writing as widely as possible, as part of my Let's-try-and-save-or-at-least-help-the-world affliction, and protecting my children from a future psychiatrist's couch ("My mum wrote about me! Embarrassing things! In a book! Without my permission! I'm doomed!")

Wait a year or two perhaps, when mum being too tired to read Winnie-the-Pooh is a distant memory, her hair is flowing freely, and she hasn't died.

In the meantime, I'll keep blogging. But only when I feel like it. It could be several times a week, or it could be once a month. You'll just have to wait and see, and so will I.

That leaves me with the final task on blog post 100, which is to add a photograph.

"One day, we will look back, Owl and I, and marvel at the road we have travelled."

That's what I wrote on the About Owl page when I started the blog. I guess that day has come. So off I go in search of a photographer, to immortalise us both, Owl and I, looking back.

I find youngest daughter. She agrees on the condition that Bear can be photographed for the blog too, wearing the brand-new waistcoat I made for him this weekend. (See, I'm on the way down that mountain. Sewing waistcoats for bears. Must be feeling better.)

Doesn't he mind being on the blog then? Unlike Pig?

No, he doesn't. One day, asserts the younger daughter, he is going to be famous anyway, so he might as well start getting used to the paparazzi.

I wonder... could I seize this moment? This particular child is most mortified if people talk to mum about the blog or the cancer... but let's see.

"How about a making the blog into a book?"

No. Just NO. For the record: if there is ever going to be a book, the younger daughter is NOT (repeat: NOT) going to contribute to the production of the front cover. We're sticking with mug shots for the blog. Here they are.

Owl and I, looking back on a cancer-filled year

The almost-famous Bear in his new waistcoat