Looking for the manual…..

Firstly sorry for the delay in updates, but as you can imagine we needed some thinking time

We live our lives in a world of instructions, policies and rules, you can’t buy a toaster without having a multi-lingual manual telling you the multiple ways to brown a bit of bread, and I want a manual for this. Over the past four months since the last blog we have tried to make sense of things, tried to be practical, in fact practical is what we do.

How should we be acting, what should we be doing, I really don’t know. There does not appear to be a manual for this, no instructions, so we are making it up. So there may be days when we do or say things that are wrong but we actually are just a little bit lost.

Simon has now stopped working, the affects of chemo, juggling work and home life just were getting too much and so the decision was made to take his leave from the work arena. This was very difficult for Simon, his colleagues and us both.

There are times when emotion overwhelms me but mostly I have hammered reality into a secure box and am trying not to think about what is happening to us. I can get up and go to work, food shop, cook dinner, just don’t ask me how I really am. I am going through the weeks one week at a time and on Friday just relish the thought I have got through another week.

There are however people who can support and assist us. Through our GP we had a visit from St Lukes Hospice palliative care team, we now have a member of their team that is there to support us. This visit was a huge deal for us and opening the front door to someone from a hospice was huge, this sort of thing was definitely in my locked and sealed emotion box that neither of us wanted to open, but we did and we sat and chatted to this wonderful lady (Carol). At this point please let me add that Simon is not in need of the hospice at this time and emotional support is what they are going to give us both. We know that at some point in the future this team will be in our lives, but for now they will stand in the shadows until we reach out fully to them.

So, unable to find a manual, or google search that helped us we decided to use a line from one of our favourite films, The Shawshank Redemption……..

Get busy living or get busy dying………

There is no bucket list, no top ten places to visit, we are just going to live our best life. This has taken several turns, and we have been busy planning things.

Firstly, we have sorted out Simons study/man cave, he now has a blokes place, TV, PlayStation, books, just a place for him to chill and watch the random rubbish he normally subjects me too……

The big thing we have done is buy a campervan……..this is currently a VW T6 that is being converted and we should pick up in a few weeks. There is much excitment with this and that we are going to be able to hit the road and travel, have overnight stays or go on day trips. I am going to leave full updates on when we get the delivery of our purchase in a few weeks. Safe to say Simon is uber excited about this and there are random daily deliveries of everything campervan.

We are also going on holiday, we are planning a week away. This is being done by delaying a chemo cycle for a week and via London we are going to Scotland by sleeper.

Cancer is robbing us of a lot of things, at times it overwhelms us, but we are not done living yet.

Onwards and upwards Mr C

TTFN