A Call To My Tribe – 1 week, 1 day post results (written yesterday 22nd Dec)

This morning (5.30am) I am writing to send out a bat signal, a Warrior cry, a call to the tribe. 

This last week has, despite my absolute best soul-searching efforts been the hardest of the hardest. Every morning without fail I have woken up and faced it all again.

And in these actual dark winter mornings I struggle to see anything but the suffering this cancer is causing and will continue to cause throughout the treatment ahead for everyone around me including my family, my friends, my step children and my innocent and gorgeous little girl. 

Trust me I know that this is NOT my fault and I am certainly not deliberately inflicting this on anyone but sometimes it doesn’t let you get past the pain. Life can just be so insanely unfair and unjust and it can be nothing to do with you but it’s still f*cking shit.

Weirdly although in my darkest moments I go to the places no parent or anyone ever ever wants to go, I mainly stay stuck in a dark never-ending cycle of thinking about how the fight ahead itself, however successful it may be, is still going to be so SO hard. 

Trust me I am going to fight this with everything I and the modern world have. There will be no stone unturned and I will use every single bit of my inner strength to kick the living sh1t out of it regardless and if it was just me alone having to do this then I honestly think I could rise to it in a heartbeat with no questions and be the Warrior that I am with the determination and fight of a bull with Spanish fury. I am a Taurus and half Spanish after all.

But the most overwhelming part that I just can’t seem to get past is how this isn’t just a fight I will have to face but everyone close around me too.

It’s a fight that’s already been happening and that whilst I thought I was winning it’s come at me from a different angle and caught us all, even the Doctors, almost entirely by surprise.

It’s still got immense weaknesses, even more than I first realised, which we will use to try and rip it’s head off, but to do that we will have to fight it like it’s still the worst evil faced character in the world.

It’s already, we are pretty certain now, affecting my daughter who is just an innocent 2 and a half year old but can clearly sense something is not right and is confused and frustrated in amongst being her incredibly positive bouncy self. She has been physically ill (mild tonsillitis) which obviously hasn’t helped any of us but the anger she has had has been at some points so intense we’ve not known how to help and ALL I want to say is ‘please please don’t worry l promise I’ll go back to being the fully functioning mummy you know and love again very very soon’ when in reality I just can’t promise that because we don’t know and for a long while at least I probably won’t have the full energy to do that completely.

That in itself is utterly heart-breaking for me.

Most likely the reason I am up feeling like this at this time is that we were told last night that unlike the 6 months that was mentioned before, I am going to have to have chemotherapy (TMZ) for 13 months. This sounds ridiculously daunting but apparently it is not how most people think chemo is as it’s in a tablet form taken at home and doesn’t actually make you that tired. The radiotherapy which will involve having to go to hospital every day will still be roughly 6 weeks and it will all start at the beginning of this January.

We were also told this week that my tumour is MGMT Methylated which apparently in layman science terms (beyond me liking the band MGMT) is that the tumour has hooks on it which the chemo can latch on to, do its job even better and is generally just very very good news.

In addition, we are going for a fully integrated approach to taking it down with everything from diet to potentially an immunotherapy vaccine which we are currently heavily researching.

So the fight is on and the fight is definitely real but like most Warriors I need my tribe and my tribe really needs each other. Some days I feel like I can rally this and some days it’s just so tough that I feel like I can’t but one thing I know is that whilst it’s ok to not be ok at times, I also absolutely have to face this fight with the total belief we will beat it and I will be the person it shakes with fear to even think about looking at fighting again. 

So this is the reason I have decided that unlike Buttercup who itself shone brightly, the Mother F*cking cancer inside me will forever now be called Klootzak Vader after a rude Dutch term and a slightly well-known villain taken down ultimately by a light force bigger than him.

And this is where I need you, my tribe to stand behind me, my family and friends and each other to create an impenetrable force of energy, strength and badass vibes to tell Klootzak Vader to F*ck the F*ck off. It’s picked the wrong fight and using whatever you believe in, together we’ll all make sure it just won’t win.

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