Things are different now, than they were.
My body is different.
My hair is huge. Oodles of the stuff. It's wiry and sticks up and out. I always had too much hair, and my fear or hairdressers meant that I would do what I was told when they mentioned layers or thinning out, even though my pathetic hair-drying skills left me looking like a Christmas tree (without the decorations). But after losing so much of it, I am too scared to mess with it now. I went to the most expensive man in the salon, and told him to just cut the ends off. Straight. No fuss. He was delighted with himself, it was like going back to Hairdressing Pre-school. Easiest seventy quid he ever pocketed. I told him I had lost a lot of it before, and he said "Oh, how many babies have you had?" I said, "Three. Same as the number of chemo cycles." We didn't chat much after that.
I have scars. Now they have faded, and some are barely noticeable. I still don't have any sensation underneath my liver resection scar on my belly, so I can scrape my nails over it and feel nothing. My portocath just sits there in my upper chest, dutifully waiting. I don't like it.
I forget that I am missing parts of me. I don't think I ever asked how much bowel they took out. A couple of feet, I suppose, since we all know that there's miles of the stuff in there. But it was Large Bowel, not Small Bowel, and there's less of that (weirdly). So my transverse colon presumably became my descending colon. All very boring technical stuff, but I never thought about it before. I never asked. For someone who is generally so curious, I seemed to wilfully ignore most of the nitty gritty about what other people have been doing to me over the past few years. Go on the coping mechanisms!
It shouldn't be much of a surprise, so, that my bowel doesn't work like it used to. One of the main symptoms of bowel cancer is "change of bowel habit" (where your poo puts on a different monk's outfit each day. Kidding.) I never had any noticeable poo problems before I was diagnosed. Now I have the full range. Constipation is, without a doubt, the devil's work. Piles - also no fun. Flatulence - nuff said.
My muscles and joints are achey and creaky. Perhaps chemotherapy accelerates the ageing process. Researchers, look into it, will ya? Cos otherwise I'm just a moany middle-aged woman.
I don't work as much as I used to. I am not in work as much as I used to be, is possibly more accurate. I have had to change how I approach that famous work-life balance. If you got less life, you need less work. I feel guilty about it, sometimes, but not as guilty as I would feel if I spent all day every day working, and then told my children, sorry chaps, I have two weeks to live, shame I didn't get to hang out with you more. (This, of course, applies to everyone. It's just I think about it more. Daily.)
I also feel like I couldn't work more and still be safe. My brain hasn't quite recovered from the chemo fog yet. I hear people say that it never does. I have nominal aphasia, where I cannot find the right word when I need it. I realise this happens to most people, but I noticed it getting much worse during chemo, and it has stayed with me since. It is very frustrating. I feel like I need to take my time at work, that if I rush I will make mistakes.
An aside -
This is so obviously true for all doctors. I have an excuse to slow down. I wish everyone else did, though ideally a non-fatal one. A prominent GP recently called the doctors who work less-than-full-time "portfolio GPs", in a disparaging tone. Like they were wasters, selfish, not fully committed to the cause. Pissed me right off, I have to say. Working eighty hours a week is not a sign of your greatness. It will kill you, or hurt you, or hurt those around you including your patients. It smacks of machismo, which is frankly embarrassing.
So I can't work as hard as I used to, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. I have started doing other stuff, that I enjoy and that help, like writing, and reading, and engaging with the wider world (that's a euphemism for hanging out on twitter). I am less scared than I used to be. I am happy to make an eejit of myself running down the hill to my house and stopping after about 30 yards puffing and panting. I will dance anywhere, any time. I cry every time I hear the opening bars of Don't Stop Believin'.
And despite the aches and pains and memory lapses and farting, that's a good thing.
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