You look, you stare, you see an answer that
was always there, from the one person whose opinion you will need more than any
other. There will always be that face
when the lights come on, or it will be the last face we see when the lights go
out. It is the face which is devoid of all bias and influence, for it is our
own face, its my face. When I look into the mirror I see someone that I didn’t
see 2 years ago, I am not that person anymore. I ask myself reams and reams of
questions that, if posed by any other, would be a gross overstepping of
boundary and personal space.
It has now been a full year since my last
operation, and I like to think that during that time, I have been hard but fair
with myself. I have challenged myself, perhaps not to my full potential or
ability, nevertheless I have done some things that required me to dig a little
deeper. Its an odd feeling, knowing that 365 days have passed since a complete
stranger, or a room full of strangers, burrowed into my skull in an attempt to
rectify a very real problem (hydrocephalus, removal of a VP shunt which had blocked, and to perform a ventriculostomy (cutting teeny tiny slits into my ventricle wall to allow drainage)). The clarity I received before all of my operations
will be something I will never forget. It invariably changed me, and the fact
that I accepted death will scare me for the rest of my life. I said my
goodbyes, but not with the intention of dying.
We have all looked into the mirror and
either seen a person who we believe can achieve something great, or we fail,
falling short of the expectation. Sometimes I feel I don’t eve know the person
I see anymore. I remember when I was
posed the question last year about moving to London, and it took me a second to
make up my mind, but a great deal longer to formulate why I did so.
Perhaps it was because of the road I have
endured, perhaps it was my desire to realize the importance of a challenge, or
perhaps it was because I looked at myself in the mirror after my operation in
October, with a shaved head, 4 scars etched into my skull, a bump from the
ventriculostomy, a scar running down my abdomen, a tan from travelling Europe
for 5 months, a smile across my face, and a deep burning desire in my eyes to
achieve something, to define my own rules rather than let the cancer define me.
People always ask me a few basic questions,
I say “basic” in the most endearing manner possible because they are genuinely
interested or concerned, but don’t want to probe, therefore the questions are
always the same. They seek to know how I am, or my next step in this unforeseen
road. Every now and again, people come along who challenge you, they seek to
ignite that fire that was always there but under the calmness of normality, the
fire subsides. But sometimes that person gets the response they were looking
for.
So there I stand, looking at myself in the
least vain way possible, I find myself looking for faults that I will always
know are there, still truths that lie undisturbed, and thoughts that will
always be secret to me. Things that no other person will ever know, the answers
that I uncovered mere seconds before my surgeries, they are the answers you get
in that moment of clarity before a life threatening moment.
So, its been a year, every day I wake
up knowing this thing is still in my head, and it puts that extra spring in my
step, and it becomes the reason to smile. Sometimes the challenge mounts, and
the paranoia of having cancer begins to creep in. I haven’t had an MRI (very
happy to have a prolonged stay from that tunnel) for 6 months, but at the same
time, as time continues to pass, I begin to feel aches and pains, weird feelings
that I don’t think were there 6 months ago.
Sleeplessness is my latest foe, and it kindly
reminds me that it is winning the battle from 3am-5am every morning. Perhaps it
is due to it being a year since my last operation, and my conscious thought is
battling with my subconscious trying to make sense of everything that has
happened over the last two years, or maybe its because my brain is still trying
to blur and blacken out what happened.
In those 2 hours of sleeplessness, I tend to ask myself questions, and I
build scenarios of everything that has happened and could happen, and then I
build a scenario of what I want to happen.I like to think I prevail and that I define my own dreams.
The hardest thing to accept, personally, is
that cancer changes things. It changes people, it changes perspective, it
changes values, norms, outset, personalities and it changes lives. There are
two sides to whose life it changes, it
changes the “victim” and it changes those in the "blast zone". It took me a great
deal of time to full accept that I have cancer, it is in me, doing something
(albeit at a very, very slow rate), but it is still there and for me, that
changes things. It makes me question a great deal of things, and it is not some
conceited stance on life or me thinking that I have something different to
offer, its just that I always ask myself whether I am doing what makes me happy
at that moment, and whether that could be the happiest I can be.
In the end, you have to find solace and
comfort in who you are, you have to address
that person in the mirror, and know that everyday you have the opportunity to
do what makes you happy, it isn’t a question of circumstance, because we can
all find happiness in the most primitive of acts.
Don’t waste the time we have left, don’t
ever stop questioning yourself, and don’t lose the desire to find the things in
life that make you happy, and who you are.
No comments:
Post a Comment