Saturday Night at the Movies

Ads with high production values and slightly racy content. No booster seats. No trips to the toilet at the best part. No snooze during the bit where they can't find the unicorn. 

It's been so long since I went to a grown-up movie in the cinema, I had forgotten what it's like. 

Of course it's a cliché to talk about "living your life to the full" or "making the most of the time you have" when you have been faced with your own mortality, but sure it's inevitable. Our brains are simple things, and if you tell them they can't have something than they suddenly really really want it. 

So I have decided to start going to the cinema again. When a movie comes out that I want to see, I'm not going to just read the previews and reviews and watch the promo chatshow appearances, and then regret that I didn't go, and then watch it four years later on a Bank Holiday Monday on RTE, and curse the ads. 

I am just going to go. 

The only realistic way to do that is to go by myself, because organising a babysitter adds a layer of complication that will make me simply give up. Besides, I am the right kind of movie-watcher. I like to sit, rapt, from the beginning to the very end. Zero chat. Zero noisy sweets. Zero texting or tweeting. And despite the dodgy pelvic floor, no bloody going to the toilet. (What the heck? I mean, what the actual heck is wrong with grown adults that they can't sit still for two hours?)
So I am much better off by myself, where I can sit in the spot of my choosing and isolate myself from the poor quality movie-watchers. 

I went last night. I brought camomile tea in a travel mug, and two triangles of Toblerone in a little plastic bag. My mother's training has not been wasted. ("The price of that popcorn! Sure you could go to Paris for a week for that money!" And she could, too.)

A wave of nostalgia and emotions surged over me as the opening credits rolled. Not least because I was watching the sequel to a movie I had watched probably ten times on a grainy VHS in our near-slum of a flat in college. It was probably the first movie I saw that made me realise that science fiction can be more about humanity than alienity (em, err?)
My point being that the story was touching and moving and thought-provoking, and not (just) about shooting people with far-out guns. 

I don't really know what I thought about Bladerunner 2049, from a critical perspective, because I was so immersed in the whole cinema experience. The sounds, the taste, the smell - I'd forgotten the beauty of it all. 

So another one to add to the list of Stuff I Am Going To Do Because I'm Not Currently Dying - regular trips to the local cinema. Next time I'm going to bring my slippers. 

Rehab

I ain't got the time....

No, I'm not about to confess that I have secretly been snorting lighter fluid, or horsing into the horse. 

My kind of rehab is much more mundane.

I am trying to get my body and mind back to where it should be, or where I imagine it should be.

In psychiatry, they talk about your pre-morbid personality. What you were like "before". Before you were the way you are now. Before you became depressed, or psychotic, or anxious, or otherwise "not yourself".
It makes me laugh. I've always been fierce morbid, there was never a time I wasn't, so how could I have a pre-morbid personality?
Anyway, what they are trying to establish is the difference between how you feel now, now that you don't feel great, compared to how you felt in the past. 
Sometimes I ask my patients, "when was the last time you felt really well?". I know now, when I am asking, that for some patients the answer is "never". Their eyes glaze over and they look at me, puzzled. What is this "well" you speak of?

I used to feel pretty good, most of the time, but my brain was still full of busy-ness and concerns and frustrations and anger at all sorts of little things. For the past ten years I have been pre-occupied, as all parents are, with child-related ruminations. Why won't she sleep? Why won't she wake up? Those stairs look dangerous. There's no way I'm letting go of his hand. Why won't she stop asking why? TIDY UP!

Then my brain had to make space for a few more preoccupations. Cancer. I couldn't even be bothered going it to again now, I'm so bored of it. But it took up quite a bit of space in the old noggin, where there wasn't a huge amount of wriggle room anyway. 

So some of the worst stuff got shoved to the side. The taste, the smell, the noise, the pain, all got swept over to a corner of my mind, like the hasty brush-sweepings of someone whose poshest friend has suddenly announced they're arriving for tea. 

But the posh friend has gone home again now, for a while, and the grime in the corner probably needs to be dealt with.

I've been getting some flashbacks. Fainting in ICU. Leaking drainage bags. Lying on the beach after chemo, unable to hear or see or move. 

And then some flashforwards. What will I do when (if) I have to do it again. Terror for allowing the (if) in. Don't get cocky lady, we all know what happens then. 

I am trying to fix my body. Pilates. Physio. Running! 
(Running. For the love of god cancer, you could have left me with some dignity). 

{The things they don't tell you about running:
If you put on the right kit - the leggings, the little socks, the runners that say Running on the inside, then it's more or less impossible NOT to run. 
If you don't go to the toilet before you leave, and your pelvic floor is in tatters, then well let's just say you won't make that mistake twice.}

It all takes quite a bit of effort. 

There is a movement afoot around cancer rehabilitation, with clinics and healthcare providers offering good advice on physical and emotional recovery after cancer treatments. Not for free though. There is a cancer market, massively expanding, and the gap has been spotted. Which is fine, if you can afford it. It would be great to see some kind of effort being made by the public services to support people after their treatment has ended, not least because it could reduce unnecessary investigations and admissions for those people whose post-cancer mental and physical state causes them to be really quite unwell.

So I'm trying to forge ahead with getting back to my self. Not my "old" self, not how I was "before", because there is no way of erasing the past three years' experiences. I wouldn't want to, given how many positive things have happened and how much I've learned. But just back to someone who isn't consumed by the omnipresence of cancer.


"Hello, is that the Priory? Yes, I'd like to check in please. I'd like to detox myself from cancer."

Pass Me My Trumpet Please...

....I'd like to give it an old blow.

Last week was a busy one. 

On Sunday, my daughter and I participated in the Cork Women's Mini Marathon.

For those of you who don't know (which included me up to ten days ago), this event is possibly the best example of a misnomer that you're likely to come across.

It has as many similarities with a marathon as a Mars Bar does with the red planet. It's just got the same name. But we had a fantastic day and walked the four miles at a slightly-faster-than-a-stroll pace, which meant we came in mid-table. And we were delighted with ourselves.

On Wednesday, I became a published author. 

I wrote a little piece for the Medical Independent about, guess what, me having cancer and all. 

That old chestnut. You'd think I'd get over it. 

On Thursday, we made some of the finest cupcakes ever to be sold at a school cake sale.

On Friday, we attended the Mercy Stars awards run by the Mercy Hospital Foundation, and I won a golden star!

Event Organiser of the Year

That's me with Jerry Flynn, the chairman of the Board of the Foundation, and my lovely husband Derek. I'll let you figure out who's who. 

On Saturday, I went to the Irish Cancer Society's Living Well Conference, and met some fellow advanced-level cancerheads. I was struck by how easy it is for people to get the wrong end of the stick, through no fault of their own. Nearly everyone who spoke about having secondary cancer was confused by what it meant - are they dying? When? How can they be, when they feel so well?

For me, after many years of dealing with cancer, it is easy to see that sometimes it's a fecking divil and rips through people, and sometimes it's just a minor inconvenience. And I know that there is no way of knowing where you stand with it. It seems that many patient are lulled into a false sense of security by concepts of "all-clear" and the five year rule (follow-up usually stops after five years as the likelihood of recurrence then is low. Low though. Not zero.)

We got good advice about diet, and cancer trial participation, and how to pester your oncology team over and over if you want to get anything done. 

I felt a little bit on the periphery though, like I didn't really belong, straddling the patient-doctor divide like someone caught climbing over a fence. And I don't have breast cancer, so I am definitely an outsider.

On Sunday, I went bag-packing in Tesco for a friend's favourite charity, Moving Mountains, which is an NGO that supports health and education initiatives in Kenya. 

I had done this bag-packing thing before, a long time ago, before I went to Kenya myself with the Surgeon Noonan Society. I remember being bored and hungover and wishing I was in the pub. 

This time, though, I found it fascinating. We were in a city centre shop, and the diversity was incredible. I would guess that at least ten different nationalities passed through the tills in the two hours I was there. Being incorrigibly nosy, I got to check out what everyone was buying on a Sunday evening. 

Quite a lot of alcohol, it has to be said. But interesting stuff, like Sambuca, and Jagermeister (on a Sunday??), and good old vodka. 

One couple bought 8 cans of Heineken and all the ingredients for a birthday cake, including TWO cans of whippy cream.....

Another woman bought two slabs of beer and four bottles of bleach. Hmmm. I had to stop myself from interfering there. 

One poor boy was asking his mum for coins for the sweet machine behind us. She started getting change out of her purse. He was mildly surprised, but delighted. She then proceeded to dump the coins into my little bucket. I am not sure I have ever seen such abject disappointment on a child's face.

So, there we are now. 

Amn't I great?