The Battle We Need Not Attend

A little over a month ago, I had my 25th birthday. A quarter of a century and at the time I was completely convinced that I had less than little to show for it. What had I done? Was there anyone’s lives that I had altered, if even slightly? Was there anyone that remembered me as someone who influenced a decision they had made in their life? At the time, prior to the thirty invites being sent out (fuelled by pure pig-headedness); my answer had been no. To all the questions and the million more that I had been forced to ponder since December 7th 2009.
To begin as David Copperfield- I was born, I grew up, would be superfluous. To put things into perspective, the invites were frowned upon by the three members of my family because they believed I would not be well enough. They wanted it to be shifted to another month; but I saw immediately moving from it anywhere away from April 12th would mean that I would become a pretentious ‘I survived cancer’ party- which of course I didn’t want. Besides, I was loathed to celebrate the demise of something which is solely responsible for my complete transformation as a human being (a quarter of the way through her life). Call me strange, and many would, I was almost ready to have a little ‘do just to celebrate me being the one in four that is struck with this parasite. Nothing too big, just a few close friends. Let’s not go overboard now; I still have to have chemo. Never good, no matter which angle you see it from. The end result was me sitting like a giant ashen blob in the corner of the joyous crowd I had surrounded myself with and being fed food by those that noticed me. I had only shifted a few times; to indicate to my mum who stood in the kitchen surrounded by raw meat and little filo pastries, that I was still breathing and that yes, she was right, this was a bad idea.
As an aside, isn’t it beautiful that among a crowd; you and your mother can always find each others gaze no matter how great the distance. Until it came time for the cake; I used my 6”5 friend as a hoist and creaked my way to behind the cake which was being lit ceremoniously as the onlookers suddenly gathered and I decided to suddenly feel coy.
I saw in people’s faces as I raked my eyes over the formed circle that there were tears. Already? The truth is they were crying when they got the invite, and as they were being offered a beer by dad and my sister was carting trays of mini pastries to each clustered group. This was never going to be your average birthday party. Many saw it as a celebration of my life and others saw it as a good-bye. No matter how often you reel those uplifting Hodgkin’s statistics to people, the “c” word dominates and an epitaph is pictured deep in their thoughts. My speech was dreadful and at the time I remember looking down at the lovely custom cake (with a picture of Johnny Depp as the Mad Hatter on it (long story!!)) and wishing he would gobble me up and we could disappear into the mud cake swirl which was sure to make me nauseous. I blew out one candle at a time and even then it was a struggle; midway I remember looking around to the semi circle and smiling weakly as if to say “no, this isn’t s a joke, this is an actual effort to blow out five candles”.
Surprisingly, the following morning I awoke before anyone else in the family and drifted barefoot around all the areas where people had stood. Where wine had been spilled and pastry had dried. I noted the hundreds of confetti pieces that said “25” had snuck inside every groove of our kitchen tiles and had sunken deep in the half eaten pavlova with the discolored kiwi seeds atop it. I had begun to clean away the glasses with the different shades of lipstick on them when I stopped suddenly and sunk into a picnic chair on the porch to watch the rain which had just begun to drizzle. There was more work involved here than there had been in setting up and I was beyond tired. I thought of the faces which had attended, had I gotten to speak to all of them? Had I bored them, shocked them, ignored them, fed them enough?
Finally, just as the rain began to pelt down on the porch roof so that it was near deafening, a thought came to me. Finally one thought that was worth more than every other I’d had, found its way inside my addled brain and I pondered it. I sat there in my crumpled pajamas, bald head and sunken eyes and thought about one thing- do they love me? I know; it seems unreasonable to fault guests which have spent their Saturday night in a suburban house the size of a shoebox listening to a play list which selection ranged from Perry Como to Limp Bizkit. But what struck me harder than the actual thought and how selfish I was being, was that I wasn’t sure if they did. Right there and then, I wasn’t sure. What more did these people have to do, have to say to prove their affection to me?
Strictly put… nothing. There was nothing more they could do, or say and no many more visits would have made an ounce of difference to my insecurity. I decided when I sat there that my insecurity hadn’t always been present.
Don’t ask how I came to the conclusion but there in the glory of a beautiful Sunday morning, marking the beginning of my 26th year, with the sun shining faintly behind the clouds and the rain turning into a sweet sun shower… I blamed God. Yep, you read correctly, I blamed the very thing that was at that moment show-casing His unfathomable brilliance and mercy. What had come to me a week earlier, in a little less dramatic moment whilst sitting in the car on my way to radiotherapy was that He had hurt me.
Picture this: I was running late to radiotherapy, getting really smart with the time slots thinking rebelliously that I wasn’t going to allow this thing to take up one more inch of my life so instead of leaving twenty minutes to get to the hospital, I’ll only leave seventeen. Ha! That should fix them. Fifteen minutes later and one of those roadwork moments where you can scarcely see a wheelbarrow being toted, I was only a few kilometers down the road. I picked up my cell phone and the hospitals number. I got all the way through to the switchboard before I saw in my peripheral vision, the red and blue lights which twist your insides.
The officer tried so hard not to look at my bald head. He asked what reason I had for using my phone and I told him whilst also claiming that I wouldn’t blame him if he didn’t believe me. After an excrutatingly long time he came back to my window and handed me an infringement notice. He apologized for not being able to give me a break and I apologized for making him stop. We parted with friendly smiles and a mutual agreement that I had just fallen into the ‘foolish’ trench momentarily and I would never let it happen again. Two hundred and forty five dollars later, and I guess you could say I had learnt my lesson.
There’s the catch; according to yours truly I didn’t need anymore lessons this year. I had learnt patience and perseverance, love and longing, wealth and poverty, illness and mediocrity. I had learnt words like “terminal” and “febrile”, words that I’m positive humans can go their whole lives without needing to know. I had learnt pain and soothing, fatigue and irritability and most importantly; which medications will send you off to sleep quickest. Xanax is better than Temazapam, hot bags for the spine and hips after every Neulasta shot and above all, hydration is the key. Did I need to learn another lesson? Couldn’t school be out for me, at least until I was back on my feet?
This aside, I got back into my car and calmly drove the rest of the way to radiotherapy. They hadn’t missed me, had not even noticed that I hadn’t fronted. I went to my allocated locker, fished out my crinkled hospital gown and pulled it forcibly over my head. My fingers tapped impatiently by my side as the radiologists took the measurements to make sure they were hitting the right spot. In was hovering somewhere between anger, frustration, overwhelming emotion, rebellion and fatigue, always fatigue.
I made just inside my car before I cracked it. Completely did my block inside my closed car which was hot from the brilliant sunshine. I collapsed on the wheel of my car and sobbed like a child. Before I knew where I was, I had locked the doors on the car and stared up to the sky to warm Him that we needed to talk. As if He had to get ready for my tirade. Plain and simple, that’s what it was; a tirade, a barrage of “why me?”s and “it’s not fairs”; even after I had sworn I would never do that. I didn’t mind that I might die; I didn’t mind that 2010 for me would be a complete right-off that I never needed. All I minded about was that He thought so little of me that he dished cancer out to me dispassionately. That I meant so little to Him that He would allow this to happen to me and (what it felt like at the time) was to give me no resources in order to conquer it. What bothered me most was the stark realization that I would mean so little to His ultimate plan down the tracks, that my absence would not sway His solution to the world’s problems. It was clear to me then that I was never going to make a difference to anyone and therefore it didn’t matter if I were well or ill, dead or alive. I was in a word- expendable. And in my irrational mind- unloved.
It hurt, literally. I was hurt and in our human brains which shall remain forever juvenile no matter what our age, I played “no speakies” to God for the rest of the day. Then it turned into a week, and before I knew it I was having a party celebrating the very fact that He had placed me here and kept me going for 25 years.

I was diagnosed with Nodular Schlerosing Hodgkin’s Lymphoma on the 7th of December 2009 at around 7:30 at night. Glass half full people call it NSHL or my “affliction”; glass half empties call it cancer. I’d done some stuff in my life, valued material possessions over anything else, disobeyed the parental units, made fun of the red-headed kid in school, hell I’d even been drunk twice. But I knew I didn’t deserve this. Nobody, whether they are Mussolini or Mother Teresa deserves this and nothing will ever convince me otherwise.
Speaking of positive and negative views, I began this journey as a soldier who coated herself in positive thoughts, held a shield of faith and kept the helmet of knowledge over her head. Nothing would trounce me… until my first chemo.
Emergency ambulance, sixteen bouts to the toilet, six vomits and one faint. Then came five attempts to canulate my arm, four different anti-emetics, two sedatives and a grand total of about half an hours sleep in twenty-four hours. Consider myself fully trounced.

So having subsequently de-sheathed my warrior’s gear, I was discharged from hospital the afternoon before Christmas and sat dumbfounded in my bedroom with my mouth hanging open wondering who had stolen all my said ‘gumption’. Christmas was blanketed in a revered respect; suddenly buying my sister the Ipod she so desperately wanted and she giving me a year’s gym membership seemed foolish. I excused myself mid-morning for what I explained as a nap (which turned out to be another mouth-hanging-open moment). When I awoke, my mum had cooked a turkey, a chicken, a loin of ham, baked potatoes and vegetables. These enormous dishes sat lined up along the bench with tin foil over them, gravy in a thermos. I realized the rest of the house had gone to sleep as well, no doubt their bodies reacting to the shock too.
Recovery time was inevitable; attempts to try and gain normality were exhausted. Six or seven movies were put on every hour, each one getting to about twenty minutes and failing to be the escape we so greatly needed. No movie was funny enough, fantastical enough or favorite enough to touch the spot.

In retrospect, what have I to complain about? After the fourth chemo, the PET scan showed almost complete disappearance of the cancer. But as with every infection, you have to finish the course of antibiotics… so another two chemo treatments and a month of radio. But when that news landed on my ears, apart from almost harassing the oncologist to do the tests again, and then redo; I realized that my fight was for a different reason. I was fighting for the end of all this. Something I had not thought would work, actually worked. ‘Light at the end of the tunnel’ became my favorite term (thank heavens we don’t have to pay royalties for these uplifting connotations).
Metaphorically, I picked up my dented shield, grasped the wrong end of my blunt sword and placed on my rusted helmet which was far too big for me even from the beginning. I began to swing haphazardedly through the days and committed the greatest sin known to man… acted as though it was all my doing.

There was a reason why my armor had not stayed on past the first few hours of active treatment, there was a reason why it had never even fitted properly in the first place. You are not meant to fight this one; this is for Him and Him alone. This is the instance that David speaks about when he says that our God will fight for us. Not with us, not when we get weary; although He will do that too. This instance, the great fight… He takes over and all you have to remember to do is breath. Well, actually you don’t even have to do that. He’s installed this awesome device called the para-sympathetic nervous system which will automatically inhale and exhale as you need. In fact, it is almost impossible to not breathe; the fight is trying to stop those lungs inflating themselves.
I know what you’re thinking; Annie is mad? All I have done is fight. For many this is true, it may be the case. But lets cast our minds back to a day when we lay there feeling like we’d almost passed over into the darkness; each second ticked over, whether it was a second spent vomiting, or crying. A minute spent hearing that treatment wasn’t working or a quarter hour waiting for prescriptions at the pharmacy. Time moves on, and doesn’t it heal all wounds? Doesn’t it bring us closer to the end, whether it’s the end of treatment (remission) or the end of our time (which for many is a blessed relief)? It doesn’t stop while we gather our thoughts, or while we spend six hours in chemo being filled with fluids. My saving grace (which is often disguised as my worst enemy) is that time moves on. Each breath is another second you’ve survived, and remember you haven’t even fought for that yet?
This post is not meant to rub the noses of those that actually have to go on ventilators or instruments that have been man-made to make our hearts beat. To those, I have not only the highest level of respect and awe but also no words for. Perhaps this is the position when you say “God works in mysterious ways”; that phrase we hate because it is a quote basically telling us that we won’t understand everything. A human’s worst nightmare, especially one living in the 21st century. We are used to knowing everything, our monthly cholesterol reading, which internet provider is the cheapest, and that our PM likes crumpets for breakfast.
Realistically, complete and utter surrender is something none of us with ever experience. Some will come close, to being fully enveloped in the Fathers’ arms while we are still alive. But it’s in our nature to buck, even when we say we acknowledge His absolute dominance, to believe that we can tweak the plans and the end result will be all the better for it. Secretly, I don’t think He admires our rebellion but at times He must be amused at the most fervent follower still trying to “fix” the game so that he comes out ahead. Our imperfections make us vulnerable, they make us beautiful. They make us in desperate need to saving, in desperate need of the knight in shining armor.

I’m finishing this journal one week from beginning back at work and I am nervous. Nervous and still waiting for the words “secondary” or “reoccurrence”. I think I’ll always be waiting for those words and others with baited breath. Breath that I still have though. Breath that inflates and deflates without my asking it to do so- the unappreciated beauty of my beautiful lasting breath.