Learning To Step Back

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My first reaction to my son's decision to step into my place was relief washing over me.  I'd known for some time I could no longer keep going, not even at the much slower pace and with the reduction in standards that I'd had to accept as my new normal.  Just the same, I had always been the one in the family who made everything happen, paying the bills, cooking, cleaning, washing and putting the clothes away.  I was the fairy godmother who magicked the house tidy every day.  I was the one who found the "missing item" that was right in front of their noses.  I was the one who joked and teased and made them laugh and stepping back from life is not part of my nature.  I grieved for the way I used to be and I could not imagine that I could be that way again yet at the same time I believed utterly that I could make myself well.  Cognitive dissonance at its most obvious!

The second reaction was to be aware of the enormity of my son's generosity.  He already worked full time, albeit from the home, and had been gradually taking on more and more of his own work.  To learn how to run a house and family completely is no simple task for a young man just starting out in life, especially as he had increasingly to look after my needs.  For some time he had been doing the shopping so he was a dab hand at that and it was easy enough to learn to use the washing machine, but it was the seemingly invisible  things that I did that made life easy for the family that were difficult to explain as I'd been doing them on auto pilot his whole life.  

Washing machines do the hard work but they don't remind you how not to give white T shirts the appearance of having been tie-dyed pink, purple and black, nor do they tell you not to put silk pillow cases in with the towels.  This is where technology helped.  He used his phone to take photos of which items should be grouped together ~ a typical Gen Y approach!

But....then it came to cooking.  I need to tell you right here and now that my approach to cooking is definitely not the traditional approach.  I do read recipes and I do own a number of recipe books but my attitude towards them is casual to say the least.  I refuse to cook anything that has more than three steps and I don't cook anything that requires me to stand by the stove stirring for long periods of time.  My attention span, when it comes to cooking, lasts no longer than twenty minutes from beginning to end unless I can marinate the meat, pop it into the oven and forget it until it's finished.  I have other concerns that are more pressing, such as wandering outside and looking at the garden with a critical eye while I visualise my next attack on it.  

The way I view recipes is that they're merely a guide and, from there, my imagination takes over until there's little or no resemblance whatsoever to the photo in the recipe book.  When it comes to measuring.....I don't.  I'm sure that the creators of those recipes are quite right when it comes to amounts but they rarely tally with my ideas.  However, strangely enough, my meals have always been looked upon favourably.  So, my son, having been told that his favourite meals don't come from recipes in books but from a vague idea in my mind, took out paper and pen ready for me to dictate how to put them together.  The hilarious moments referred to in my previous blog came about when he asked for amounts and this is what he had to interpret as an actual recipe:   "cut up about six chicken thighs, sprinkle them with quite a lot of paprika, then add a few sprinkles of either dried or fresh rosemary, add plenty of garlic.  Chop up an onion into wedges but if it's a small onion, chop up two onions.  Don't make the wedges too small or they'll burn, or too big or they won't cook in time.  Add tomato paste, not too much, and if there's no tomato paste you can use tomato pesto.  Slice up potatoes, enough to cover the top then put it into the oven at 180 degrees until it looks cooked."  "Don't forget to salt the chicken before you add the other ingredients"  (I added, a little belatedly).   To me that made perfect sense but, as a novice cook, he freaked out!  He's a perfectionist; he could warm up food in the microwave and cook bacon and eggs but this was foreign territory and I was asking him to ad lib!  My son, unlike me, is not an ad libber.   After much debate, we managed to convert my measurements, which were described as "a lot, quite a lot, not too much, a fair bit, a bit and a tiny bit" into teaspoonsful and dessertspoonsful to make it possible for him to produce something resembling what he was used to.

Not surprisingly, he has turned out to be a better cook than I am because he actually measures ingredients and concentrates on cooking them; he doesn't wander off.  He stays on the job until it's finished.  From that first recipe he has created a recipe book of his own, based on my vague directions and he turns out delicious meals.

From this time on, he became more and more involved in the housekeeping until he was doing everything single handedly while I lay in bed becoming more and more of an invalid, to my great frustration and dismay.  The idea was for me to relax, recover and regain my health but this wasn't happening.  My husband, son and I brainstormed ideas over and over, trying to understand why I wasn't responding and why I was going downhill so fast. We tried everything we could think of. 

If only one of those many GPs and physicians I consulted had been less blinkered and had thought of the most obvious reason why a person who, on all superficial tests, is perfectly healthy, nevertheless is blatantly incapable of walking without staggering, standing for longer than a minute, is unable to get up out of a chair without assistance and faints if she stands too quickly.  I looked frail; even I could see that and, to my great horror, I was frail.  I was pale and had dark circles around my eyes yet not one doctor thought to test me for cancer, the disease which attacks one in every two to three people.  They asked me whether I was keeping up my mammograms and I answered yes because I was,  but not one of them thought to check just in case a hidden cancer was lurking.  All doctors know that cancer is not always obvious in its early stages and that there are such things as MRIs, CT scans and PET scans but not one of those physicians thought it necessary to refer me for a scan.  They preferred to sit behind their desks and write out a script for antidepressants.  Why?  Because, apparently, a lot of women "do well on them" and it seems that the more a woman protests that she is not depressed, the more doctors take that as an indicator of depression!  If we refuse antidepressants and insist that we are still ill, the indication is that we're neurotic or a hypochondriac.  For ten years I was told by one doctor after another that I was in normal health and that they didn't need to see me again; in other words, I was discharged from their care and, sadly, it's the case that there is a grapevine in small cities.  Once you've visited several physicians and not been satisfied with their diagnosis the word goes around that you're a "doctor shopper" and a "difficult patient".  This is what happened to me.  Do I sound angry and bitter?  Of course I do.  Those doctors threw my life away.

Now we come to the truth about mammograms.  The last thing I want to do is to scare anyone but mammograms are not infallible.  If you are a woman with dense breasts, mammograms do not always show up a tumour because the dense tissue hides tumours.  Furthermore, if your tumour, like mine, is made up of diffuse cancer cells, it is impossible to feel by palpation so self examination is futile, as is palpation by doctors, as is the view given by mammogram films.  There is a strong case for a lot of women to have ultrasound examination rather than, or as an adjunct to, mammograms.  The tumour in my right breast had already reached a massive 10cm before it was found and it would not have been found but for the fact that I developed another primary tumour in the left breast, quite a rare occurrence.  This tumour became obvious before it reached 2cm in size and it appeared almost overnight.  The day I noticed it I made an appointment for investigations and it was those investigations which revealed the metastatic tumour in the right breast, a tumour which was gradually killing me.  I say that without any degree of overstatement whatsoever.  If the tumour in the left breast had not appeared, my cancer would have been terminal.  As it is, it is Stage IV.

One of the intentions of this blog is to dispel the myth that people who reach Stage IV cancer before it is discovered have either been in denial or have not been having check ups; that it is impossible to not know you have cancer.  I hope that the above goes some way to dispelling the myth that those in whom Stage IV cancer has been diagnosed de novo (from the beginning) are in any way to blame for their unhappy circumstance.

I also intend to show that, despite bureaucracies' denials,  breast cancer is still a killer disease ~


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