9 years

So – here I go again – another anniversary. Even just writing ‘9 years’ makes me feel a little teary as it’s ridiculous and wonderful and I am very very lucky. 9 years living with stage IV cancer – an utter madness!

As is so often the case this particular anniversary has also coincided with scans. Since the ‘scare’ more like ‘terror’ back in June I’ve been upgraded from 6 monthly to 3 monthly brain MRIs (alongside the body CT) so instead of just having the double scans twice a year I now have the treat of getting them every time. SO, lots of and lots of anxiety and dread made infinitely worse by both the recent brain blip and the horrid feeling of gloom and sadness that September has provided for the last 9 years.

Thankfully yesterday’s news was all good! My body CT shows everything continues to be stable and my brain scan describes June’s horror – the little f****er on my brain as ‘barely appreciable’ and the rest of my brain as ‘unremarkable’. If it weren’t such good news and such a relief I’d be deeply offended by the language!

When I first started writing this blog I obviously didn’t expect to still be here and writing it all these years later and that’s very much the case for my anniversary blogs. So really I have very little to say beyond the fact that I still find September 24th very complicated.

In the run up to the date it’s impossible not to remember the tricky months and weeks that preceded the horrible appointment back in 2013 when I knew too much not to be terrified. It also means that I am continually shocked and grateful that despite how bleak it looked back then I’m still here very much here. The sense of relief at still being here is always tempered by the fact that I have lost so many friends along the way. This year has been particularly brutal for my European melanoma group and that has felt hard because not just have so many friends from that group died but they’re the ones who have been the most educated in their disease, the most determined to seek the best treatment. The fact that we’d all meet and see each other year after year felt almost like a safety net – as if they were still ok – then I might keep being ok too. Plus, more importantly, I miss them.

So 24th Sep will always feel complicated. I spend the weeks before battling with gloom and the actual day is a peculiar mixture of grief for all the friends I have lost, sadness at what cancer has done to my life and all those around me, alongside sheer astonishment that 9 years on I am alive, albeit very much living with cancer but living with it is infinitely better than the alternative. So many years of memories and milestones that all seemed not just unlikely but genuinely impossible.

As I selected pictures to accompany this blog I tried to choose one from each year from within a few weeks of Sep 24th and have ended up feeling quite overwhelmed by seeing my lovely boys turn for tiny little things into the delightfully oversized boy/men I have now. There are so many holiday pictures showing the four of us just doing our best to live in the moment and we have been so lucky for that to have just kept on going on and on. Plus, an excessive number of pictures of glasses of champagne toasting every good scan and milestone along the way. Also, because my birthday is awkwardly close there are lots of pictures of me and cake all they way from me at ridiculously youthful 36 (far too young to be diagnosed with ‘terminal’ cancer through to me turning 45 nearly a year ago!

So, today I shall be raising a glass (or two) to much missed friends, to years of beating the odds and being able to just keep being here and to all those lovely people who have helped Andy and I ‘live in the moment’ for a crazy long 9 years.

9 Years !