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."
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