Living as if im dying

Yes it’s true, when you are diagnosed with cancer something inside of you starts to die, you start to live as if you are dying and I think that is especially so if you are at an advanced stage of cancer,the dreaded stage 4.😢

I think you can’t help it, especially at the beginning of all this happening to you and so you start to stop doing things that perhaps you could be doing. 😢

My wife has organised several lovely things for us as a family to do in the run up and during the Christmas holidays. My name has been pencilled in , you know so that it can be easily rubbed out and that’s my fault entirely. It’s like I’m a ghost .🥀

My answer to everything she has proposed has been a ooh not sure if I can do that and what if I’m not feeling great or what if what if what if , you get my drift here, right. I might as well wait for the grim reaper to appear himself and with one mighty swoosh of his sythe end it all, I do presume of course that grim reaper sythes make swooshing noises, I wonder if anyone is alive to corroborate that argument, I doubt it.

I’m also perhaps being rather presumptuous to even think that he still uses a sythe and is he actually a he , oh my I’m getting side tracked again, I’ll just blame that on the cancer and then just move on shall we , nothing to see here folks , keep moving, that’s right it’s all good.

Anyway where the hell was I👺 you like the intended reference  there to hell, littery genius I hear you say, what with the grim reaper in the previous paragraph and all that, ok it isn’t funny anymore I get it. 😃

The problem is you see you put cancer first or at least I have, it becomes the balance on what I do or don’t do. Shall we do this Woody , well hold on a tick let’s see what Mr cancer has to say first , well fuck Mr cancer , (sorry mum), you are not the main man around here it’s me, got it. It’s my rules from now on and I don’t need your permission to do anything, if I want to go and see a show up in London then I damm well am going to see a show up in London with my wife and kids, you are not taking that away from me. 💪

That feels better now I’ve got it out of my system,  it’s strange how this illness makes you think about stuff im going to put myself and family to the front, cancer is not going to be a choice about anything. It’s not going to control what I decide to do.🙏

Tonight I went for a walk , I decided to walk a bit faster , I stopped limping and pretended that there was nothing wrong with me and started walking normally. Guess what happened, yep I walked normally nothing happened. Why was I limping before , well that was because cancer had told me to limp because it would hurt more if I didn’t  well it didn’t. 🚶‍♀️🚶‍♂️🚶

I’m going to just go about my business as if there is nothing wrong with me, I’m going to stop grunting so much every time I get up off the couch, I must sound like some dying beast from the jungle every time I go to stand up. Well that’s going to stop. 🦁

I read about a man who has had stage 4 prostate which had spread to pretty much the same places mine has, he was diagnosed in 1999 and is still alive today , he’s my man my model of excellence that I need to believe in. If he can do it then so can I. Searching the internet has it’s good points and before you tell me off I’m just looking for positives that’s all.🙏

Sunday 4 .30am

I’ve woken up with a busy mind , thoughts jumping around in my head that need an excape. I’ve been thinking about my man who has survived prostate cancer for so long in my condition . He’s now 77 years old , what did he do, how did he do it then another voice comes into my head STOP Woody 

It shouts at me, don’t be stupid we are all unique , it turns out after more investigation that he did nothing really except it seems he got lucky he got the right treatment at the right time, I’m thinking the universe had a lot to do with this one. Of course we are all.looking for the cure, I’m lying here in bed thankful for a lot of things.🙏

Thankful that apart from cancer I’ve got my health , my heart is good my brain seems ok and about 95 % of my body is absolutely fine. I’m going to stop focusing on the 5 % and stop focusing on what I can’t do. I’ve been putting off putting up the outside christmas lights, today they are going up, that’s a promise. 

It’s so easy to get stuck in a mindset of I can’t do it. The cancer is winning every time I do that. Some times I think it’s just the easier option to say no I can’t, I mean I’ve got a great excuse for nearly everything I’m asked to do or need to do. The cancer excuse is going to get thrown in the bin. I feel good just writing this, it’s my way forward. One thing I’ve discovered is most cases of people surviving cancer that I’ve read about or watched on YouTube they all have something in common and that is the(apologies mum) fuck you cancer you don’t exist I’m living my life anyway attitude , they are not scared little mice that are frightened of leaving the safety of the nest, they are they are just normal.people who are just getting on with it , doing things that cancer people are not supposed to do and that’s living life and not living life as if they are dying.

Go out today and stop making excuses for living a great life. You have all you need if you’ve got health. If you havnt got health you’ve still got everything you need , nothing can stop you except YOU. Don’t use anything for an excuse, you don’t need excuses. Life is meant to be lived not feared.

 I once wrote a short story yet to be published about a man who lived his life fearing everything, ironically his main fear was getting cancer so he lived his whole life doing what he could to avoid getting cancer , he lived without getting married or having kids or relationships he finally after 50 years of being scared got cancer and then his life turned around. It took him 50 years of living as if he was going to die to realise what he had been missing out on, he had wasted a good deal of his time living in fear untill it overtook him. Getting cancer was the best thing to happen to him his life started from that point.

Now it’s ironic that the story I wrote has echoes of me , except I was fortunate to live my life but I’ve always been scared of a lot of stuff that’s affected my life. It’s ironic that the character in my story got cancer he then turned his life around a bit like a modern day Scrooge story.

That’s another thing I must do , I wrote a book of short stories a few years ago, about 20 stories about how our thoughts control our lives, it was read by a close friend who said I must get it published.  I’ve been making excuse after excuse to myself not to publish it, I think the time has come to stop finding excuses and just do it. ❤️