Life Begins...

Life Begins at 40 apparently, and, as it happens, I turn 40 next week.  However, I feel my life, my new life, began 4 years ago, when I was diagnosed with Breast Cancer.  Of course, at that time life was thrown into disarray and my entire future disappeared before my eyes.  It was not until I came out the other end of treatment and found my 'new normal' (a phrase my fellow Cancer peeps will understand) that I was able to embrace my new life and appreciate the wonder that it is.  

I wrote a blog through my treatment which I found therapeutic and I have been toying with the idea of writing again for a while.  I want this to be the antidote to my previous blog.  Part of the reason for writing a blog was to help support other people in similar situations as I found it invaluable reading other peoples blogs at the time.  I feel I owe it to anyone who followed my previous blog to now share how life continues.  Hopefully I can give hope and support to people following in my footsteps by telling it as it is - the annoyance of seemingly never ending hospital appointments (I dream of the day I go a year without setting foot in a hospital!), dealing with menopausal symptoms when your 'too young for menopause', getting back to work and choices over what to tell colleagues, learning to find balance between wanting to do everything NOW and being able to plan for a future that tentatively exists.  Sometimes its a struggle to appreciate a 'normal' life, sometimes I feel overwhelming joy at the smallest of things.  Sometimes I feel resentful about what has been taken away, sometimes I feel grateful to have been given a second chance and a new outlook.  Life after cancer is very normal and mundane and at the same time it is magnified, sparkly and bright.  I think there are parts of my personality that have come alive and been pushed to the front, it's not so much that I am a different person from before, just that I do things that I perhaps wouldn't have done before, or I think about things in a slightly different way.   

Life after cancer is not all joy and laughter; cancer never leaves you, even when there is no trace of it physically.  A good friend told me it was like an elephant in the room and eventually it gets smaller and smaller.  My elephant is just a little ornament on a shelf now.  Sometimes it grows, falls off the shelf and makes itself known but I've learnt the art of picking it up and putting it back on the shelf, sometimes even hiding it behind a book!  I live with the elephant and I am the person I am now because of it - it has taken some time to come to this acceptance and I'm sure I will write more about this at some point.

Getting back to the whole '40' thing, you won't be surprised to know that I have no sadness at turning 40 - living a life after cancer means celebrating every day, week, month, year that I get to spend with my husband, daughters, parents, brother, extended family and all my fabulous friends.  I have now lost several friends to cancer, such is life within the 'cancer community'.  It doesn't get any easier and the only thing that saves me is to each time renew a pledge to live every minute to the full -  I owe it to those that had that privilege ripped away.  So, with all that being said, I struggled to find some fitting way to mark my 40th year on this amazing planet. The universe answered my ponderings by suggesting a trek up the highest freestanding mountain in the world - Mt Kilimanjaro.  Why not?!