I wrote this in mid 2014, but never pressed publish. I have several posts that have sat in the draft folder waiting. I have all these words inside me, constantly pushing against my psyche, demanding to be told. So tell them I shall.
"It could be worse."
I've lost count of the number of times I have had that said to me.
No shit sherlock. Tell me something I don't know. I could have had invasive DCIS, had to have chemotherapy, and all the horrible things you have to endure through that, or had to have a bilateral mastectomy, or be terminal stage 4.
Knowing all those things didn't make me feel any better. To be honest, it really pissed me off when people said "it could be worse" to me. I wanted to say, "Well, when you get diagnosed with cancer, let me know how you feel about it then, mhmm? ok?" But I didn't.
For the most part people say things not to minimise your experience, but instead to highlight the positives. Unfortunately, when you are first diagnosed with cancer, you have trouble seeing absolutely anything positive about it. All you can see, feel, breathe is the fact that your body, for reasons unknown to you, has turned on itself. That there are cells in you that have the potential to kill you. Take your life away. Destroy you.
That is what was going through my head back in March this year. That, and a big WHAT THE FUCK!? Had I not already suffered enough? Had I not already fought and wrestled with a enough demons to last several peoples lifetimes?
I thought I had endured battles before. But this year... this year has to have been the biggest battle I have fought. A couple of weeks after I was diagnosed, and making the decision that my boys needed to go and live with their fathers, I had what I can only describe as a psychotic break. I completely lost it. Flipped my lid. Lost the plot. It was not pretty, and I believe the closest to insanity I have ever come.
I got in my car, left my boys behind -
a hurt that I will carry in my heart forevermore - and screamed and howled and sobbed as I drove. I didn't know where I was going. I didn't care. I was beyond caring. My brain had fractured into a million tiny pieces. Nothing made sense. Reality and fiction were one and the same. Rationality and irrationality had merged into a black vortex of confusion and despair. I couldn't breath, I couldn't think, I couldn't see, I couldn't feel, I felt too much, thought too much, saw too much. I was numb, yet feeling everything intensified infinitely.
My beautiful boys were picked up by the police -
a hurt that I will carry in my heart forevermore - and taken to the police station, where someone, who was once a friend, picked them up and looked after them. Me - I had ended up in a car park of a popular tourist attraction, punching decline, decline, decline, as my phone kept ringing.
The screaming, howling, crying abated. My consciousness left my body and hovered above, in a state of disconnect.
And there I stayed for far longer then I thought I would.
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