Fear and creating a life here

I’ve jumped out of a plane again.

Much to the disappointment of my parents – who thought I had given up that reckless habit – I jumped as soon as I physically could.

In a skydive you have to trust the air, trust the gear, but most importantly, trust yourself. Your life is in your hands, and only yours.

I haven’t got to the point yet where I feel fearless on the ride up, but I was surprised by how natural it felt to throw myself out after twenty months bound to the ground.

Yet the bright lights of Wellington twinkle and I am afraid.

Up until now, I’ve been hiding in my hole up in Cluny lodge. It was safe, comfortable and nurturing. That existence understood that I was ‘sick’, and therefore less able to be adjectives such as “fun”, “adventurous” and the like.

There was always something. Some reason to be different, some reason to stay in my safe little hideaway. First it was recovery from brain surgery, then IVF, then radiation sapping my energy, then chemotherapy.

But now what?

I find myself living with my incredible husband in a little studio in a city called Wellington, the capital city of New Zealand - a city with a soul and a mind. Yet I find myself feeling alone, feeling old and worn. Yes, even introverts can feel alone.

Hang on a minute – old and worn?! Bethany, you’re twenty-one for God’s sake! Have you not you just learnt that life is precious, that it may expire at any time, that every moment is a gift to be grabbed and lived to the fullest and fanciest?

Let me begin the next chapter by deeply apologising to you if you have viewed me as a valiant heroine fearlessly kicking the ass out of cancer. I’m far from it.

I’ve been afraid, stumbling along the road of life and following its twists and turns because there are no other roads to take.

The journey is certainly not over. 

***

So, enough theorising. I went to Adrenalin Forest with James and his workmates over the weekend, and had fun. 

Yes, fun! Is it strange that someone my age is having to make goals to have fun?! Well, that's what I'm doing. With my lack of excuses and increases in energy, I am going to share my goals. It's a little scary making them public...but for the sake of holding myself accountable to fun, I'm trusting you with them.

- Learn to be an acrobat with Leonela
- Learn to Poledance (have already taken one class) - make a friend
- Take an art class and make a friend there
- Have dinner with at least one girlfriend every week
- Have a glass of wine with dinner every night
- Dance with James each day
- Read fiction for pure enjoyment - always have a book on the go. 

I survived!

I woke this morning before our alarm. I could feel energy pulsing through my veins. Is this what it’s like to feel normal again?

You may or may not have noticed that in my last post talking about chemo I had changed it all to past tense.

That’s right – I’M FINISHED!!!

Just this week Dr Hamilton, my oncologist, decided that three cycles of PCV is enough, and that any more chemo would mean the costs (long term and permanent side effects) would outweigh the potential benefits of continuing (more possible poisoning of potential cancer cells - all quite vague really).

***

At the beginning of chemo, when I heard there was a maximum of six cycles, I was pumped to do all six. “Give me all you’ve got,” I told Dr Hamilton.

Easy for someone to say when they are feeling fine, huh?

It should take a few months, they say, for me to return to the lower-end-of-average energy levels and platelet levels (bruising etc), and the tingling fingers and aching jaw should subside a little within six but will likely never come fully right. But as for dizziness, headaches and vomiting through the night – I said goodbye to them as I walked out of Dr Hamilton’s office the other day.

Not to mention, the pills and IV injections and all that poison…it’s all over. It really makes me realise what a privilege it is to be able to nourish my body and not poison it.

***

And no longer can I say “I have a brain tumour,” “I have cancer,” or even “I’m having treatment,” – what does that make me now? It feels a little strange to no longer be any of these, even though it’s all gone so fast. A survivor, perhaps? Although I have a suspicion I’ll need to reach a two-year or five-year mark before I can join that club.

Oh, what the heck. I’m a survivor. 

Identity and learning

(I wrote this a couple of weeks ago - sorry I only am just getting around to posting it!)

  ...

I think I’m having an identity crisis.

Alton, a wonderful mentor and professor at the University of Idaho, asked me before we left Moscow what my main lesson had been over the three years. I told him with sureness, “I have learned to love.”

Despite love being something I’ve since found that you can’t “know” once and for all and you can never fully learn it, it’s probably a fair statement considering the anti-love, anti-commitment girl that started at the university in January 2010.

I took a big exam this a while ago. I didn’t do very well. In fact, I left before anyone else, leaving multiple blank answers. It was something I thought I was “good at” – general knowledge, writing, basic grammar and numeracy, and last but not least, exams. I thought that stuff came naturally.

I thought journalism stuff comes naturally, that’s one of the main reasons I’m doing it.

In Idaho I studied Anthropology and International Studies. Of course, despite all that training, I didn’t come away telling Alton, “I learned to be an anthropologist.” No, I learned about love.

What on earth am I learning about now? I wonder, as I lie on our bed with a headache and barely energy to type.

Perhaps it is to learn. That’s what I’ve been wondering today anyway.  “Learning to learn” was the catch-phrase when I went to school. I should have taken that more seriously.

Now, faced with my own inadequacies, I see that I can’t, and don’t want to, just float on by doing things last minute and still getting “good grades” (quotation marks implying I don’t know what the worth of those really were in the end). I want to, and need to, truly learn things. Repeat. Visualise. Discuss. Articulate. Question. Repeat.

Or perhaps it is to say sorry. That’s something I’ve always struggled with, that humility thing. I may say it was the cancer that has “brought me to my knees,” but don’t believe it.

The cancer was only a trigger. It was a situation I found myself in that required me to rely on others, and that made me act out of character and have to apologise for it. I didn’t want it to be an excuse, ever.

I guess time will tell what I’m learning from this stage of life. I hope, and am sure; it’s not just journalism. 

Smooth towels

The old crackly ones were always my favourites. The way they would tickle my body, removing any remaining cells that didn’t belong. It was the best form of exfoliation – so much better than all those products with little exfoliating bits in them and fake scents that they charged way too much for. All you need is a nice, old crusty towel.

Those newer towels were always last left in our clean towel pile. They just didn’t feel good; they didn’t itch itches or exfoliate skin in a delightful way. And to make matters worse, they always felt wet straight away. Gross.

Then, there are some towels that are rough on one side, smooth on the other.

I used the smooth side today, and even those annoyingly-wet-feeling smooth fibres seemed to grate and cut my skin, making me scrunch my eyes a little and once again, silently swallow the pain.

That’s what the chemo has done lately. It’s made me make drastic life changes like changing to soft towels. It’s made sitting on the toilet become something that makes me gasp, despite needing to do it more often. My arms shake as I lever myself out of bed in the morning.

And the other day, it won. I was beat, as I woke after a sleepless night covered in itchy red rashes. I finally gave in and took a day off class. The nurse had no idea why, but wasn’t surprised. Nothing is surprising with chemotherapy. It does as it pleases.

The rashes have gone away now, but I now understand what creates the air of sympathy and pity that surrounds chemo.

Chemotherapy will soon be viewed as archaic, and people will no longer have to go through it. Doctors will remorsefully admit they administered it, and people like me will be regarded as some of chemotherapy’s last victims.

I have always been a dreamer, and tended to change my life plan every few months and be passionately pursuing it until the new idea. Perhaps I need to dream again, to make a plan. But to be honest, even to remain a functioning member of society takes effort and so I just have to focus on getting through this, day by day, moment by moment.

And I just have to suck it up use the smooth towels, for now. 

"Side Effects"

Keyboard letters came so easily to me when I typed. Typing is a sign of the worlds privileged in itself, I suppose. It just come so naturally to ...us. 

I remember sitting on our ragged couch in Togo with Ro’s cousin showing him the magical way a key pressed on one surface will make a little black letter appear on another surface.

Reminded of this now as I type, I realize that I took this ability for granted, my fingers searching for the letters they don’t always find.

The chemo has been going well. I am bright most days. I am doing well at my course, keeping ahead. 

I am also currently hunched over my laptop in pain, typing slowly with slow fingers that spend their days tingling, and about to go to bed at 8.15pm, exhausted.

I’m humbled that you would read my little black dots on a screen.

Good night,

B

The City that Cried Wolf

"Just a Sharpie and a glass: Kiwi ingenuity leads to easy quake measurer"

The house we are staying in overlooks Wellington. It’s beautiful. The Tararua mountain range in the distance, the Orongorongas stretching down the other side of a harbour on which weak, dappled sunlight wavers. It all seems quite…developed. Affluent. Peaceful.

Yet, “20 seconds of horror” screams the headline. The first seven pages of today’s newspaper are all about the quakes that have shaken the area over the weekend.

Emails with solemn tones have been circulated between journalism students. The expectation is to rush in to the un-earthquake secure building at dinnertime on a Sunday night and excitedly find people who had to rush to shelter, whose bookshelves lost their books or whose vase broke.

It’s not that I don’t care about the earthquakes, or the people who have to pick up bottles or books or even the one person who was injured by their TV coming loose off the wall.

It’s just that, well, I worry.

I worry about the fact that my friends in the US and around the world are being told that an “earthquake more powerful than 100 atomic bombs and the Christchurch quakes of 2011” has hit Wellington. For, on first glance of these articles, they are completely justified in feeling worried that we are in a dire situation.

Beyond that, I worry about what Wellington would do if a really devastating earthquake hit, whether the world would think nothing of it as we think nothing of natural disasters in other small nations. It’s not their fault for not being concerned - they’ve just heard it all before.

So let’s take a new approach.

New Zealand sits right on the fault line where the Pacific plate has been jammed under the Indo-Australian plate. In fact, that subduction line that circles the Pacific and creates the ring of fire is right behind our house.

“Wellington Earthquake free for eight months”

The media reaction to something so natural to the earth as an earthquake serves as an illustration of how humans have unquestioningly come to believe we rule the natural world. Unfortunately, monotheistic religion can take a lot of the blame for that, in propagating ideas of the earth being ours to reap and condemning other belief systems that consider humans at one with nature.

“Kiwis reminded of the incredible power of nature”

For how dare the earth, which formed by these processes over billions of years for us to live on and enjoy now, shake the house we have built with cut down trees or paid for with a concept of money we have created?

“Amazing subduction process going on right under our feet”

Despite my hesitancy at going into a field that expects me to instill fear in people in one of the safest countries in the world for the sake of selling papers, hits or page counts, I do love journalism. I love telling important stories about important issues, I love inspiring people, entertaining and educating them, and believe this is what the media should be about.

That’s why I believe people deserve more than simply fear instilling, sensational reporting. That’s why people deserve to hear more about the plates and the incredible forces of nature than someone falling off their seat in a movie theatre. There is a place for discussing emergency plans, which has been done, but why not find out who has opposed earthquake strengthening and see what they think now?

Yes, I know, because we are writing to that mythical eleven-year-old who reads the news every day but wants his or her entertainment.

How about -

“Hey John, Wellington ROCKS!”*

*Earlier this year Prime Minister John Key referenced Wellington as being a “dying city”. Needless to say, people in the capital weren’t happy about that. Cheers Guy for saying this!