The Weird Day

Here I am again, breaking records that haven’t been broken since 2013, and effectively doubling my yearly blogging productivity. There was a time when I dabbled in fashion blogging. I wasn’t very good, and didn’t have a huge following (pretty sure it was mainly just my girlfriends that read them) but every week or so, I’d take the time to do it, for me. Probably mostly for my own vanity if I’m honest. Soon every week became every couple of weeks, then every month, then every couple of months and in time the spaces between gaps became wider and wider and the world moved onto the ’gram, and I moved on to wearing a uniform most days of the week (which is not fashion forward enough to deserve one blog post, let alone one a week) and mostly being in gym gear when I’m not.

 

Today is a weird day. I can’t help but to feel as though I need to acknowledge it, and the cloud that usually hangs over this time of year. Yet as I sit on my balcony – which, had the world not decided to continue its meltdown, could have been the balcony of my hotel room overlooking the lakes of Queenstown – I look out on my neighbourhood below completely clear skies. I hear the calls of at least five different birds; beyond the tree in my front yard are the trees in the park, and if I ignore the houses partially obscuring the view, I see the mountains in the (very distant) distance. It’s not Queenstown or Wanaka, but it’s definitely not bad. I know I am one of the fortunate ones – I am afforded the luxury of having a home, with a yard and a balcony that overlooks the park, a home gym, a supporting husband, the option of having my groceries delivered to me, and a stable job/income that I’ve found myself feeling increasingly guilty about, while so many others are struggling (by the way if anyone reading this is struggling financially or mentally, reach out– we are more than happy to help out however we can). And beyond that, I am grateful to be in a country in which I feel safe – where, despite not ever being able to please everyone, our leaders still get out there and try to do their jobs even though they know they’re going to be getting a hard time for it. Do I think that bloke in charge is a bit of a peanut? Yes. Would I want to trade places with him? Not for all the money in the world. And just the fact that we can openly voice our opinions about disagreeing with the country’s Upper Management shows what freedoms some people take for granted. Anyway, I’m not very into politics, and this post was not meant to be about Covid and what it’s taken, but it is about something that was taken.

 

Today marks sixteen years since Mum took her life. I have officially now lived half of my life without her, and to be honest I don’t really know how that makes me feel. On one hand, I feel so far away from that naïve teenager who just thought she was throwing up because she was unwell – and I suppose she was, just not the sort of unwell I thought – who got towels to clean up, and tried to give her water to drink even though she wasn’t responding in words. And yet, simultaneously as I write those words, tears involuntarily well in my eyes and I’m transported back, and so vividly remember the panic I was starting to feel tugging at me that things were not okay. Like the way they portray memories in the Pensieve, I remember the blurred swirls of background, and in the middle of it, clear as day, the blue and red fleece jumper with ‘Angel’ embroidered on the front I was wearing; the neon green numbers on the digital clock in my parent’s bedroom; the dim light of the lamp on her bedside; the sweat on her brow; the smell – the sickly sweet one I now know to be tissue necrosing – something that transports me right back every time I learn in too closely and unintentionally smell on the breath of an end-of-life patient at work.

 

I remember one of my sisters – then seven years younger than I am now – coming home from work and instantly knowing that something was wrong, calling an ambulance and saying “I think my Mum’s taken something,” and realising in that moment just how dumb I’d been. I remember the first ambulance arriving – her getting moved to the floor – how she’d soiled the bed – how they called for back-up – how I sat staring blankly in my own bedroom after the second ambulance arrived and the big burly paramedic ambled into what I’m sure he already knew was a lost cause. I watched them cut through her pyjamas and attach the defibrillator, and then I left and stared blankly at the wall from the edge of my bed in my room, and remember thinking to myself ‘I wonder if this means I’ll get an extension on my Social Studies assignment?’ and to this day I am angry that that’s what my mind chose to think in that moment, when one of the most important people in my life was leaving it, but I guess the mind does weird things when it’s under distress.

 

And then there’s a blank space and swirl and I’m at the hospital – my other sister must have driven me there since the sister that called the ambulance went with her in it – I watch my dad come in with a look of panic in his eyes – I watch my middle sister also arrive, come through the doors, drop to her knees and say ‘What have you done?’ to him as he says ‘I haven’t done anything’ and to me it sounds like he is trying to convince himself more than her. And still to this day I feel like he is one of the only people he doesn’t have convinced. I remember the look on the doctor’s face when he came out and told us he was sorry but there was nothing he could do…Then having to speak to the police, my eldest sister trying to stop me from telling them that they had been arguing (and on reflection it was a mix between denial and wanting to shield him from having to be questioned) but I have never been one for hiding the truth.  

 

I sat outside on the benches in the dark, after I called my then boyfriend and told him, and it was there my cousin found me. He didn’t say much, but he put his arm around me, and there we sat in silence.

 

There was a lot of silence in the days that came. We went to my Aunty’s house to wait out the day because we weren’t allowed home until the authorities cleared it. My cousin made me toast and I said I wasn’t hungry – she told me I have to eat – and I remember thinking I don’t usually eat breakfast let alone toast, but she’s probably right so I ate it anyway. I sat on their front balcony and called one of my cousins that I thought would already know (she didn’t), and then one of my best friends. Eventually we went home. People came and went. Amongst it all, two family members – one of them my brother – made the comment “You were right there. Why didn’t you do anything?” as though my sixteen-year-old-self didn’t already feel like I was to blame.

 

Dad couldn’t bring himself to sleep in their room for weeks. Instead, he stayed on a mattress on the floor next to my bed. At night I would try not to cry because I knew it’d upset him, but because I couldn’t help it, he would always end up crying too – and there we were in what felt like this endless cycle of guilt; the two who only two people had blamed out loud, but who felt like the most to blame. I was angry at him at the start. I’m sure he was angry at me too. I’m sure the words that had been said by my sister and my brother had been thought – and caught – before they left the mouths of others. It took a long time for me to realise that the choice that was made, and the events that followed, were one person’s, and one person’s alone – though it’s all kinds of messed-up that she felt that alone. I sincerely hope Dad has found the same peace, but he is an old-school ethnic dad who is bad at feelings, so sometimes it’s hard to suss out. Plus, there are others in our lives who have never been able to think before they speak. It’s a toxic energy I’ve mostly removed from my life, for my own mental health, but Dad would never abandon, no matter how much stress and destruction it brings. I worry about him; we all do.

 

Robin Williams said that the saddest people always tried their hardest to make people happy because they know what it’s like to feel worthless and they don’t want anyone else to feel like that. That absolutely resonated with me when it came to Mum, because she has one of the greatest laughs, brightest smiles, and kindest hearts I have ever had the honour of encountering. Sometimes I wonder if it will ever apply to me, but (un)luckily internalizing feelings is not something I’m good at. Although I guess if I think about it, the specific times that I’ve felt like this statement has applied to me is when someone I know loses a loved one. I wrote in my last post about the line between empathy and pity and the difficulty that lies in walking the line between the two; I don’t know if it feels the same or not for the receiver, but if there’s light in my experience it’s that the line between sympathy and pity is a much less delicate dance.

 

It’s been many hours since I started writing and as I look at the word count I realise that I used to groan about having to submit reports and essays much shorter than this. There are a couple of small clouds in the distance now, but the sky remains for the most of it, clear. The birds are still chirping but they’re harder to hear over the man playing catch with his dog in the park across the road setting off all the rest of the neighbourhood dogs.  And even as I look away and look back, the clouds are further away still. The air feels fresh and it’s still enough that my hair only slightly moves out of and then back into place. I almost don’t care that my wifi is still not working after three days and I now have to tether the data from my phone to post this lol.

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She missed out on a lot. Birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, grandkids, feasts, weddings, son-in-laws, halves of lives. And she was is will never stop being missed. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Do what you love.

It’s been a long time since I’ve written. It’s not something that I tend to find make time for in the craziness that is day to day life. Although if I’m completely honest, the day-to-day is not all that crazy at the moment – well it is, and it isn’t. 

 In my everyday I am a healthcare professional and even as I typed that I giggled, and then repeated ‘I’m a professional’ in my best Ralph from The Simpsons voice. I have been a Radiation Therapist for the past 8 years now (man that sounds like ages when I put it down on paper) and still some days I laugh at the thought that someone thought I was competent enough to make decisions about someone’s life/cancer treatment, let alone be in charge of a machine or work area and the staff that come with it. Don’t get me wrong, I know I’m damn good at my job. It’s something, like so many others in my profession, I fell into by accident, having chosen the course at a whim, without really understanding what it entailed. But from my very first placement, I was in love (the same could not be said for half of my cohort, who dropped out of the course after the first placement – it’s not for everyone). 

If you asked me to pinpoint what exactly I love about what I do, I think it would boil down to three things: 

1) No two days are the same. The number of different things we see and do is sometimes mind-boggling. On any given day, I could be creating a thermoplastic mask for a head & neck patient after coaching them through their claustrophobia, performing CT scans, helping in MRI, tattooing patients, planning a lung patient and spending hours trying to get their heart dose under tolerance, doing quality assurance checks, in workshop pouring cerrobend cut-outs, making lead shielding, using power tools, peeling off a dressing to reveal a fungating breast lesion and packing the crevasse of that lesion with tissue-compensator to ensure an even dose, presenting a new process that we’ve implemented to our department, bladder scanning a prostate patient to see if their bladder is full enough for treatment, troubleshooting machine errors, troubleshooting set-up errors, navigating a machine breakdown, consoling a daughter who feels like she is not doing enough for her dad who has dementia and can’t keep still for treatment, matching on-board imaging and matching to millimetre accuracy – the list goes on, and this is still only a fraction of what we do. I’ve treated the soles of feet, the tops of scalps, and everything (I mean, everything – boobs, butts, vaginas, penises, fingers and big toes) in between. 

2) Because of the vast range of things we do, there is always room for growth. There will never be a day where I think I know it all, because there is so much to learn and we have an ever-evolving (scope of) practice. I’ve been in this gig for close to a decade now, and every day I learn something new – and sometimes it’s from someone who has been working a lot fewer years than I (as a proud and notoriously bossy Leo, I must admit it took me a while but I’ve grown accustomed to the taste of humble pie). And the wonderful thing – at least where I work – is that people are always encouraged and empowered to keep on learning, and to pass on the things that they have learned. 

3) The people. At the heart of it, I think this is why I we do what we do. When I tell people what I do for work I often get met with a shift in tone, a small frown, and the phrase ‘that must be so hard/sad.’ I guess I can see why people might think it would be – cancer centres are not places people usually go to by choice, and the people who leave our doors are more often than not, not the same people they were when they first came through them. But honestly, while yes, there are hard days and there are sad days, and times you wish you could do more, work is overall quite a positive place. Most of the patients have such great attitudes (whether or not that’s a facade, I couldn’t tell you – if there’s anything I’ve learnt from following @thecancerpatient on Instagram it’s that patients seem to internalise their fears and anxieties. Also, PCHP lol) and if they don’t, it’s understandable as to why. And there are few places in the hospital where practitioners get to see their patients pretty much every day, sometimes for up to 7-8 weeks – a time period which gives us a pretty unique opportunity to forge relationships that often feel like they dance on the line of friendship despite only being less than 20 minutes of interaction a day. It is a wonderful thing, to be able to share in such an important part of someone’s life. To hold their hand and assure them that they are not alone through this stage in their journey. To get a patient who is so sure they won’t be able to tolerate treatment, through their first, second, third…last treatment. To empower them with the knowledge on how the treatment works, and why exactly we do some of the things we do. To go into the room and tell a patient they have too much gas in their rectum and they need to do a big fart before we can continue (lol, always makes my day when a prim and proper gentleman lets out one so big you can taste it). 

While it’s lovely to be told that we can make what is a daunting experience less scary, and dare I say, relatively pleasant considering, the greatest compliment I feel like I have ever received is when a patient said that I made them feel like a person, not a number. It was a comment that left me simultaneously proud and a little bit sad that that was the first time they had felt that way about their care. While it may not be comfortable to point out, there is a stigma to being sick, and it is a fine line between what comes off as empathy and what comes off as pity. It is a struggle for both the giver and receiver; it is hard to give one, without the receiver feeling the undertones of the other. It’s not the same thing, but whenever I talk about my Mum’s suicide, I feel the same kind of discomfort (that’s a tale for another time). Anyway, it is another line we all dance on, but for me it was interesting to hear a patient’s perspective. For some disciplines, it may be hard to separate the patient from the person, but I suppose as radiotherapists, it is one of the lessons seeing patients on the daily affords us. And sometimes that humility (and a high standard of treatment and care) makes all the difference. 

I have rambled a lot and gone completely off-topic (not that I really started with a topic in mind), which is not something all that surprising to anyone who’s ever read my writing before. I certainly didn’t expect to spend my third day of annual leave gushing about how much I love my job (what a work nerd!) I can’t wrap this up without acknowledging though, that when I mentioned that it was ‘the people’ that made me love what I do, that I was also talking about my colleagues – not just RTs, but the doctors, nurses, physicists, the guys at the front desk, and the cleaners. It takes a special sort of person to be able to do what we do – I mentioned the high rate of dropout after my first placement – and those who persist through the hard/sad days are rewarded with a wonderful perspective on life. No matter how shitty or busy or hectic our day is; no matter how much of an ecosystem we’ve created underneath the layers of PPE (I personally, am a sweat machine), we have the luxury of being able to come to that place by choice, which is not something our patients people are afforded. It doesn’t make it any less tiring, and it doesn’t make the days any less long, but trust me, it doesn’t go unnoticed. I see you - they see you – and we are all so grateful for the hard work that you do. 

I say this all the time, but if I won the lotto today, I would still be at work tomorrow and every day I go to work feeling grateful to have the best job in the world. *dead lemming noise* 

Strange times

So, we were meant to be getting married in three days. This morning, my phone buzzed with a google calendar alert reminding me that today we were meant to be heading in to start setting up our venue - to line the tables with our table runners, decorate with the candles and jars and hessian, ready for the flowers to go in on Friday. Put up our 'til death do us party sign. Stress about the tiny details that don't really matter.

I think about how excited we should've been getting. I don't reckon I would be able to sleep by this point.

Our family and friends would have been starting to arrive from interstate and overseas, while our family and friends that already live here would be helping us get the house ready for the tea ceremony, and the last loose ends tied. No doubt I would be upset with my dad over something he had only just remembered to tell me that I needed to do, lest risk dishonouring my culture.

We would have just bought all the stuff for the cheese table that my work friend was going to put together for us and we would be struggling to fit it in the fridge with all the food for the family meet-and-greet BBQ that my sister and cousin were going to throw for us the next day, after my bridesmaids and I had been up since ridiculous-o'clock buying and arranging the flowers for the big day. Somewhere in the day I would have to find time to get my nails done.

I would be tired, and stressed, and most likely irritable. Someone - probably my sister or Aron - would have to tell me to pull my head in and stop being a jerk before I realised and settled down.

My blood type by this point would likely be Moccona Dark Roast. I would be looking forward to a transfusion of gin on Saturday. And to seeing Aron cry as I walked down the aisle towards him (or making him cry if he wasn't *shakes fist*) and to finally getting to marry the love of my life and partying with my friends and family. Before finally getting to move in to my house officially and live with a boy not related to me!

Instead, here we are. In the middle of a global pandemic. At home, in self-isolation. On the annual leave that we originally took for the wedding. One of my bosses did ask if I still wanted to take it - I told him if I could I would, because I needed some mental health time, but also that I could come back to work early if need be - it's not as if I would be doing anything anyway. I did get to move in, but that was more so that I stopped taking my hospital germs home to my dad and family, and spreading them between two houses. I suppose it's something though. And my relationship with my Dad has definitely been so much better for it - I've gone from trying to avoid seeing him in our own home, to speaking to him on the phone every day, and genuinely missing him.

Cancelling the wedding that we've been planning and looking forward to for a year and a half sucks, and I'm not gonna lie, I've had a few breakdowns about it. And then I've felt kind of guilty about said breakdowns. It's really weird, experiencing grief over something like this while so many people are sick and dying around the world. It feels irresponsible to wish that you were still getting married - after all, it was for the best  - not just for you but for everyone - to cancel, so people remind you, as if it's not possible to both mourn the loss of your wedding and still understand the importance of social distancing.

It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that it was okay to be upset; that I could be sad and still understand where cancelling our wedding fit into the scale of things going on in the world. I've worked in cancer therapy for the past six years, and perspective is not a new concept. I get over things eventually, you just gotta let me be dramatic first.

This week we officially announced our new wedding date - if the universe allows it - a year and nine days from now. All of our vendors but one were available, and the one that wasn't was happy to give us a refund for the deposit. Before we set out to rebook everything we made a pact to be as kind as we could because we knew that the industry was going to be hurting, and that we were in a position that not all other couples would be - with clinical jobs in public health that weren't going anywhere anytime soon, and being able to afford not to need our money back so long as the services were eventually provided. We made it clear that if anyone needed help, we could, and thankfully kindness is quite often reciprocated and re-planning was made easy. 

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It's such a strange time. A few months ago I'm sure the situation we all find ourselves in would have seemed impossible, yet here we are. Will all of us agree with the decisions that have to be made to keep us safe? No. Are we overreacting? Who knows. Are we not doing enough? Maybe.

But you know what, we have to trust that they are trying. Being in charge of a country must be fucking hard, and whatever decisions they make are going to be criticized. If we lock down and lives are spared, then people say we overreacted at the cost of the economy. If we don't lock down and this spirals out of control then the government hasn't done enough. Everyone suddenly becomes an expert as if making those calls are just that easy.

I look at what's happening in NY and just think of how much worse things could be. No one wants that. No one wishes that for any part of the world. You may not think this thing is a big deal, and you know what, you could be right, it could be the media blowing it out of proportion. But what if you're wrong? How shitty would you feel knowing that you had the chance to do something about it but you didn't? If someone you loved got sick because you didn't take things seriously?

I don't know how this post ended up going down this path. I'm not the kind of girl that talks about politics or world matters generally. I stopped watching the news for years because it just made me sad. I'm not saying that I agree with all of the decisions being made by our government, but man, everyone's trying their best. The least you can do is try and do yours, and to be kind while you're at it. At stop fucking hoarding shit you don't need.

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Originally when we made the decision to cancel our big wedding, we were still going to have a small tea ceremony at my Dad's, followed by a small backyard ceremony with just immediate family and the bridal party, so we could sign the papers. But then the tighter restrictions of only having five guests at a wedding came in and we felt it wouldn't be right to have our parents there at the very least, so we canned that too.

We were pretty sad about that as well, but it was a much easier hit to take. It helped that we got to come home to each other every day. And on top of that, all these people started being so extra kind to us - sending snacks and donuts and earrings and cheese and woolies and uber eats gift cards and all sorts of love and things that we didn't need but were so appreciated. And it was all too much and I still feel like we don't deserve such kindness, but it made me realise that we had to stop being so sad.

So we've decided that this Saturday, the 18th of April, 2020, our original wedding date, we're going to have a pretend wedding, with just the two of us, in our house. We're going to decorate the house and get all dolled up and do mini mock-versions of what we were gonna do on the day, from the tea ceremony, to mini vows and a ring exchange, a reception and a disco, and live stream and zoom parts of it. Everyone is invited to the 'reception' from 6.30pm onward, but dressing up is mandatory. Our catering will be provided by Uber Eats - thanks Bec - and I'm baking a cake to cut as I type. Hope you can join us! Yep, it's all kinda cheesy, but it's heaps better than just being sad!

Here's a picture of a candle I made for one of the tea ceremony trays. Traditionally, one of the trays contains big red fancy candles with a Phoenix and a Dragon on them. This gives you an idea of the quality you're going to receive from Saturday's shenanigans haha!