Plans for March

Hopefully my plans for March are more successful than the things I intended to do in February, which ended up being a far more medical month than planned and I had to pull out of a few things because I wasn’t feeling well enough. I was most sad to miss out on the 130th anniversary service for SCM!

In March then, my main plan is just to get through the month without feeling overly unwell. I do have a few other plans too! My auntie is coming to visit from the Isle of Wight for a day at the beginning of the month. I’ll also be attending part of the SCM National Gathering, which is in Kidderminster this year. I’m only going for the Saturday instead of the whole weekend, but the programme looks great and I’m looking forward to seeing friends again.

I’ll also be hosting a Big Bake for the Brain Tumour Charity. I’ve blogged about it here: https://debbiescancerblog.wordpress.com/2020/01/16/cake-coffee-and-charity/

Please do come along if you can; I’d also appreciate any donations of cakes or things for the raffle, and if you live too far away or can’t make it, the link for online donations is here: https://www.justgiving.com/Debbie-White26

For Christmas, my parents gave me tickets to the Harry Potter studios and in a couple of weeks we’ll be going there! I’m pretty excited, and will obviously be wearing Harry Potter themed clothes. Expect a fuller blog post once I’ve actually been!

Finally, we also have tickets to see the Book of Mormon at the Birmingham Hippodrome, which I’m looking forward to a lot, as I’ve heard lots of very good things about it and as soon as they announced it would be coming to Birmingham, I really wanted to go. Hopefully it will be slightly more successful than my last attempt to go to the Hippodrome…

I think those are all my plans for March, although other things might well come up. I’m trying to get better at pacing myself and not getting more unwell by doing too much, but I also don’t want to ‘waste’ good days. The usual pattern of reading etc will continue!

Put the Book Back on the Shelf

My aim for this year is to read 52 books, an average of one a week. That means by the end of February, which is fast approaching, I should be finishing my eighth book. As things stand, I’m midway through the 11th one! There’s been a few which I wasn’t enjoying so didn’t manage to finish, and because I have been quite unwell recently I haven’t felt much like reading, but today I do so I’ve started again!

The book I’m reading at the moment is a Scots version of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone – I’m enjoying it, and very grateful to my friend for sending me a wee care package containing it (alongside sweets and a card, pictured below!) I haven’t seen this friend in a long time but it was lovely to be thought of.

So far, I think the best book I’ve read this year is ‘I love the Bones of You’, a memoir by Christopher Eccleston.

‘Memoir’ doesn’t really do it justice as it’s really a very profound reflection on the nature of his relationship with his father. He deals with ideas of masculinity in a rare and thoughtful way, and his openness and honesty about his struggles with anorexia are both fascinating and heartbreaking to read. It definitely carries a content warning for eating disorders, though.

My other favourite book of the year so far is Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo – it won (jointly with Atwood’s The Testaments) the Man Booker Prize, so I was worried it might not live up to the hype but I found it unputdownable, although I don’t remember all that much about it now.

I have confirmed to myself that I don’t like James Joyce – a few years ago I tried to read Ullyses, and just got very frustrated and gave up having not managed to get into it. I tried again but had a very similar experience with Dubliners. I don’t think I actually managed to finish it – I’m sure there are people who love it but I am very much not one of them.

My own attempt at writing a book is going very slowly, and partly as a result of being ill and partly because of finding it hard to find inspiration or motivation for it, I haven’t really made any progress recently. For now though, back to reading!

Reading progress: 10/52

This Weekend

Blogging is often quite difficult to do – getting the balance right between honesty and oversharing isn’t always easy. I know I can be very guilty of omitting some of the less palatable parts of my experiences. Part of this is deliberate and part of it is that I know there’s things no one wants to hear about. I also don’t want to unnecessarily scare or worry people.

This weekend was all planned out to be a really good one – on Friday I went to the ballet at the Hippodrome with my parents. Unfortunately, I started feeling very unwell midway through the first half and we had to leave at the interval. Being fairly socially awkward, I always worry when I have to do things like that – I worry that people will think I’m being rude, or that I’m not enjoying it. In reality, probably no one noticed but these things remain true in my head. It was actually a good ballet – I’m not sure that I understood it all, but it looked beautiful. I think it’s kind of like watching a film in a language you don’t know with no subtitles or dubbing. The lighting in particular was utterly beautiful.

On Saturday, I was meant to go to Coventry cathedral (one of my favourite cathedrals, though that probably is a fairly uncontroversial opinion!) for the SCM 130 years anniversary service. I still wasn’t feeling great and after having to bail the night before, I felt it was safest to just stay home. I was sad to miss the service and to miss out on seeing some of my closest friends, but very grateful to people for live tweeting it!

Finally, today was scheduled as a rest day, but I ended up going to the emergency dentist because this morning I realised I have an abcess. I really hate the dentist, so much so that I haven’t been in years – the last time I went, the dentist said something along the lines of ‘if you don’t stop shaking, I’ll cut your tongue off’, which wasn’t particularly helpful… This dentist was very nice though and I have antibiotics, so although I’m still in pain, progress is definitely being made.

I was hoping this would be a ‘look at all the cool things I’m doing’ post, but alas no! Here’s hoping my next planned trips are more successful!

World Cancer Day 2020

World Cancer Day is today, the 4th February, and I thought I should write something about it. I have some mixed feelings about it – however many days you dedicate, the NHS is still drastically underfunded and underresourced. People who have cancer, and people who have loved ones with cancer (the current statistic is that one in two of us will be diagnosed with some kind of cancer in our lifetimes) can’t escape it – for me, every day is Cancer Day.

(Image description: my arm, showing off my World Cancer Day band for this year)

For a lot of people, talking about medical things can be very uncomfortable, and even traumatic or triggering. I’ve blotted out much of the process surrounding my diagnosis – if I get well enough, I might need to go back to Italy so that I can have more positive associations with it than constantly being sick and spending most of the time in hospital. Having said that, some of the few memories I do have make me smile – one of my brothers lent me his tablet, and he’d downloaded lots of nun games on it because he thought I’d like them. My other brother said that me being in hospital put his finding a grey hair that morning in perspective (I’m still not entirely sure which was supposed to be worse, the hair or the hospital!) and I have very fond memories of the nurse whose English was much better than my Italian but who used Google translate on her phone to try and communicate with me.

This isn’t to say that the whole experience has been positive, and I still hate the phrase ‘everything happens for a reason’ and any kind of battle or fight imagery. As for ‘God just needed one more angel in heaven’, if anyone says this at my funeral (hopefully not for a while yet!), please punch them for me.

I don’t necessarily think it’s helpful to talk about what I’ve learnt from this, mostly because given the choice, I would rather just not have cancer. You don’t get a ‘day off’ – some days are better than others, and we wouldn’t have got my lovely Arya had it not been for cancer, but I’d still rather not have it, even on ‘good days’.

So, ‘Happy(?)’ World Cancer Day to you all, and thank you to everyone who works in healthcare or research to try and make things a little bit better and a little bit easier.