Well its been a hell of a ride so far, 2020 to 2023 has seen a lot of changes for me, some good, some great and some I wish I could forget forever.
My recent life has been more about surviving than doing anything purposeful, I’ve been ‘coping’ all too well and the cracks are now gulfs and valleys.
Mentally I’m not doing so hot, when all the health shit began I was given a five year prognosis because thats the usual track for people like me who have non-alcoholic cirrosis of the liver. We are more scar tissue than liver, we don’t have energy, we have to eat as healthily as we can, we have to watch our fat intake, we are anemic and will progress to where it’s near impossible for us to produce enough red blood cells to actually function.
I’m in my 5th year now.
Yeah…..
Plus there have been tests, more scans, the cancer is still there, still doing it’s best to kill me, but as we all know my liver will get me first.
I am dying no two ways about it, the nurse who fitted my internal coil to treat the uterine cancer told me I was so small internally that they could only just fit the one I had. Plus when she read my notes fully she realised there was nothing they could do for me but that treatment due to my liver.
I’m being discussed at the meetings for cancer patients, and there’s not much they can do for me but to wait for the liver to kill me first. All they can do is support me and hope the cancers stay pain free, because dear reader I cannot take painkillers or I kill my liver.
Someone asked if I’d seen a dentist recently and I said no, not for the last five years, they looked shocked and almost as if I’d told them I boiled babies for tea every Wednesday. Only when I explained that I couldn’t have any injections, or topical pain relief did the light suddenly go on in their eyes. The comment of ‘Not even mouth ulcer treatments?’ I didn’t answer. A smack in the mouth tends to offend.
So you see, the third anniversary of me being free is also a countdown to my death, or at least the medical fraternities expectations of my death. Last year this year, last spring, last summer, last autumn, last winter and maybe seeing into another spring or maybe not.
I’ve bucked the trend on everything else, had varicies in my stomach (varicous veins that burst), internal bleeds from endometriosis, spleen making and eating red blood cells that are weirdly shaped and white blood cells the specialist would put his hands up and say have some sort of cancer to them too.
Yet I am alive, I am here still and yet I can feel the wall of the tornado getting closer, I can almost feel it now.
My mind is showing me things I really don’t want to see and deal with, the abuse I suffered at the hands of my husband who was no such thing. The total lack of care and love I lived with for decades, to be thrown aside when I wasn’t dying ‘fast enough’.
It’s there, I cannot heal it because there is no time to digest it, to look at it all and come to terms with it, I DO NOT HAVE THE TIME!
I got in touch with a place that helps sexual abuse survivors like me and their waiting list, is over ten months long, the waiting list…..not the actual seeing of someone, JUST the waiting list.
I am not fixable, I know that, either body or mind, I am broken, dying, screaming out in pain and anger to a world that is already filled with screaming people. I am lost within the mass of sound and mingled with the sea of tears from the abused and alone.
Yet I am free for the first time in my life.
Yes….
I do mean that.
Free.
No expectations on me, no dreams but my own, no nightmares but the past, no other voices to tell me what I ‘should’ be or how I ‘have’ to react. No one to speak down to me, no one to abuse my voice and words, sharpening them to weaponise them against me and others.
I may be a dying wolf, thin, bedraggled, sick and alone. But it’s better than a collared, fat, abused dog, who keeps waiting for things to get better, by doing more of what my ‘owners’ wanted.
Everything comes in threes they say, maybe I’ll get to six years, who knows?
See you in the funny pages
Jo
ghosthare22 