I'm Alive: Hope and love and piss and death and stuff...

I'm awake, blurry, hazy and my mouth feels like a plasterers elbow took a ground and pound session out on it, but I'm fairly chipper

As always at Royal Marsden, the nurses and ward staff are impeccably attentive and on their game. As always at Royal Marsden, I'm in a ward with sick people, mostly old people, the smell of death hangs heavily in the air, mortality and morbidity checks aplenty.

Cancer takes from you more than it gives, that's a fact. But, the more I live with it, over time, it gives something to me that I've kind of become dependant on. No matter what shit goes down, however frustrating the day to day grind, in these moments when I’m hurting physically and whacked out on opiates for the pain, I always have an overwhelming sense of gratefulness. I’m alive and it matters not that I didn’t take every opportunity to make yesterday the greatest day of my life, because I’m here and now, and I can take this moment as something to treasure. I know I can draw from the strength that cancer has given me again right now to change the ordinary, harness the obstacles and remember that every experience is neither a positive or a negative. Every experience is a learning that presents an opportunity for me to create a better me, you, us.

It hurts mind and it smells of piss and death and stuff. But, I have decided that by the time I check myself out of here tomorrow, I’ll have added hope and love to the piss and death and stuff for at least one of my ward companions. Looking at the faces of my brothers in arms, I believe I have the capacity to at least draw a little humour from our collective head clusterfuck.

The sound of the chemo pump in the bed opposite me is a poisonous rhythm, strumming its death march. The beep beep beep of the various monitors and alarms are the orchestra of our impending doom. This ward needs some good vibrations. I’m keen to deploy some ‘Be Nice’ on this joint because a little magic love dust goes a long way when the lights go out and the sleeplessness kicks in.

They’ll be shouting ‘One More…’ by the morning, just you wait and see…!

One Love

Jez

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