Waiting

Waiting          

We spend a large portion of our lives in wait, the driving force behind each is different but it seems that there is a culture of waiting that has infiltrated modern society. Sometimes one doesn’t have a choice, but rather the opportunity to effectively use the time in wait. I don’t mean wait as in the odd pause at a bus stop where we will invariably feel uncomfortable in our own skin and reach for our safety net… our mobile phone.  We are now so ingrained in a culture of “always on”, that we don’t know the importance or the lesson learned in waiting.

We wait until the last moment of the evening to tell someone we love them, we wait until a conversation is over to tell our parents or loved ones that we love or miss them. General conversations start with the most “important” thing being said first, and that often isn’t , “I love you”, I just hope its a matter of saving the best till last which is hopefully a meaningful goodbye or a heart felt message that we wait until the last word is said.

There are many reasons why we wait, but there are two that I identify with more than any other, the first is the waiting for something worthwhile, like a person you care about, or the return of a sentimental worldly possession. It has no material worth to anyone but yourself, it is rather something that is linked to your heart, and yours alone… whilst others can comprehend its value, only its true value is known to you. It is not something that can be sought by going out and actively finding or pursuing it… you cant go out and actively find love, sometimes you just have to let it or that person find you. You also find that in the process of waiting you find other things that help and heal you. They are bumps in an otherwise flawless road, and they seek to build your virtue of patience.

The second version of waiting runs in stark contrast to the first, whilst the first is driven by an emotion of love and positive anticipation, the second is perhaps fuelled by fear. Waiting for an answer to a question is normally considered an easy act, except if that answer carries the weight of your perfectly crafted world with it. The fear we all come to understand when waiting for a test result, the safe arrival of a loved one, the birth or departure of a soul into and out of this world all requires some form of waiting.

Over riding all of that is the waiting for an answer around our own mortality.

Today, I will slide back into the MRI tunnel at the LOC, I would have already participated in a battery of blood and neurological tests, I would’ve answered a few questions about my mental and physical state of mind. I would already have a puncture wound in my right arm from the contrast that will be streaming throughout my veins. My waiting will be over the second that magnetic resonance indicator switches on and it breaks into a number of intricately crafted sequences, that go through the different layers of my brain, pulling the contrast in different directions and patterns to project a detailed schematic of my brain to the panel of radiologists behind the safety glass.

Amidst layered mass of my brain, I know what they will be looking at. It is what I have been thinking and waiting on for a year, it holds the answer to all the questions I have asked since my last scan over a year ago… what has happened in the one year absence since they last took a look inside my head.

The scan will last for a better part of an hour, during which I will lie in wait, yet again, of what they will find. I will have a face mask on that limits the movement of my head inside the MRI tunnel, I will have earphones fastened to my ears to blur out the drumming and drone of the MRI. Most importantly I will be smiling, because I know that once again I have lived completely this past year. I have found happiness, friends, family, love, laughter, fun and life. Of course there have been moments of weakness where I retreat into myself to sure up the defences, but I cant fault myself for that… I can only make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Once the MRI scan is complete  my time will slow down, I will then have to wait four days until I visit my neuro-oncologist the following week. A very long weekend will be beginning where I will question exactly what they found during my scan. That is the wait that I am fearful of, it wraps itself around your every thought in an attempt to facilitate negative thought.

I have known the full weight of fear behind waiting, but I have also learnt that waiting for the right thing is the  far more rewarding. 

History, MyStery, MyStory

To know where you’re going, you have to know where you’ve been.  I have been to the precipice of death… or right to the very point of where you start living. I will never, ever forget what happened to me, it fundamentally changed me… perhaps for the better, but it changed me nevertheless. I see things differently, I feel things more intensely and I linger just a little longer than I normally would have when moments of life happen.

Im coming up on my first scan in over a year, and whilst its an incredible feeling to have been put on this treatment plan of so called “monitoring” and my leave of absence from the MRI tunnel, its only passive monitoring for the doctors and never for the patient. I still wake up in the morning and go to bed every night with this very real thing happening to me. I cannot say I do not worry about that scan, it is my first scan in over a year and one never knows what the cells can do in a year, all I know is that I have given my best shot at living. Perhaps I could have worked a little harder, paid more attention to maintaining certain relationships and not worried about what people think of me… but isn’t that the purpose of life, to learn continuously and right until the end and if youre lucky enough people acknowledge that if even for a second, you showed them what it meant to be alive. I do admit that sometimes after a long day, my head hurts… that very same nausea comes back and I feel pangs of pain from another time in my life. That is my body reminding me of the very real road I walked, and the reminder of a promise I made to myself in the seconds before my 10 hour operation, “Brad, if you wake up from this… you’re are going to live” (and then I like to think I told myself to have a nice dream).

So I woke up, and I say that literally and figuratively… I woke up from a sleep that changed my life and that was after 2 similar operations and before another one… so someone was really trying to get me to see the bigger picture. The best part about it now is that I walk around the streets of London anonymously, no one here apart from my friends and family know my story, I am treated like everybody else and I would have it no other way. As I stroll down the street my thoughts are still very different to most, and it was along such a walk the other day that I thought “what would my obituary read?”

I know that sounds incredibly macabre, but it actually gave me a great deal of perspective because I had to look at myself and weigh up what I would like people to say versus what they would probably say. Would I be remembered for the right things in relation to what I spend most of my life doing? Its just a way to keep yourself in check and to not lose the importance of being.

At times during the day I forget about my plight and my story, but the future has an incredible ability to make you remember the past. I don’t know whether its because of my story that I am now aware of cancer or whether this was always going to happen. In the past year I have seen 4 of my friends be taken away by this disease, as well as see people who followed this blog end communication with me due to their untimely passing. Paul Radville, Wesley Ingle, Caleb Keegan and Jess Nicholson have all been taken way too soon because of cancer. It took the strongest types of cancer to take those 4 individuals from this earth, and only their incredibly strong minds and bodies could have ridden out the storm like they did. They are the strongest and bravest people I know. You never really understand the impact that cancer has on someone until that someone is you, it is scary. It is unfair. It is not the end. Their stories will change the lives of the people around them for the rest of their lives.

I had an incredible compliment the other day when a family friend commented that I “always seem to be on holiday”… she had been following me on social media and through this deduced that I had to be on holiday to constantly be having such fun, for her to only find out that I had taken no such leave and that that behavior was actually what I get up to on a standard weekend with my girlfriend. I know some people probably don’t approve of some of the things I do in my quest to have fun, but I don’t subscribe to criticism or negativity so odds are I wont end up listening anyway.

Some things in my story are still to be written, some highs and lows will inevitably comes to pass, but so long as I keep my heart in the right place, my head relatively far away from danger and my friends close I will never lose sight of whats important.

So, I go into these stressful few weeks with a clear focus and determination. That armor that I wore constantly in 2012 is there, but unused and loose. I will only recall on it should the moment require it, but I hope that it doesn’t. I just focus on keeping my head in the right place, my heart in a happy state and a constant smile on my face. When they call my name to enter that tunnel or for whatever blood tests they require, I will shakily rise as I have every other time… but I will be positive, I will wear a cheeky smile on my face and hopefully all will go according to plan.

So my story is far from conclusion, but I will make sure that whether Im writing the story or someone is reading it, I will make it memorable.

Keep living.

BW