Month: August 2019

Posted in Life

Discombobulated

Posted on by Sharon
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Photo by Tim Goedhart on Unsplash

Wednesday. 9:38pm. I arrive home from photography class and Tim is home.

I hadn’t seen him since Sunday night – he’d left for Sydney at 5:00am on Monday and being a bad wife I hadn’t woken up to say goodbye.

He says, not as soon as I walk in the door you must realise, ‘you have an appointment with your breast surgeon on Monday’.

Oh.

My hands start to pick at non-existent fluff on the couch and I feel my insides begin to wobble like a poorly set jelly.

Are you okay, Tim asks.

I am discombobulated, I reply.

I don’t know the dictionary definition of that word but it feels like it fits. Discomforted, uneasy, thrown for a loop (is that even an expression?), discomposed.

I’d obviously made the appointment some time ago, but had forgotten. And in the being reminded of it I felt discombobulated.

Is it a check-up, Tim asks.

Yep, I reply.

Yep. It’s a check up. But it’s also a reminder, one I obviously hadn’t prepared myself for, of cancer. Of having had breast cancer earlier this year. Of having had surgery and radiotherapy treatment, and of being horrified that this had happened to me.

Yes, my breast is still discoloured and there’s a bruise-like stain where the lump was removed, and under my arm is still numb, and my breast hurts when I walk, so yes, there’s the constant reminders. But I can/have disassociated them from having had cancer. They’re just part of life now.

But seeing the breast surgeon – the reminder of that – is different somehow.

It’s not over.

This cancer – and I really don’t want to call it a journey – but this cancer thing isn’t over. No, it’s more than that. The fear is there because it happened in the first place. And more than fear, there’s a horror that it happened at all.

The fear/horror lurks somewhere and I’m never sure when it’s going to make itself known.

Driving to photography class for the first class back after the break, it made itself known. I’d continued attending class all through my treatment and I hadn’t realised there was an association in my head/body/gut between class and treatment, but anxiety crept over me as I headed to class that first day back. I was stuck in traffic and couldn’t pull over to settle myself, so I called my sister instead. She provided a good distraction.

I couldn’t go to work on Thursday – couldn’t settle, the fear again making itself known as I thought about the appointment with the breast surgeon. Deb noticed I was home and called me. Was I okay?

Not really.

I called the surgeon’s office on Friday to ask if the appointment was real – although I didn’t ask that particular question – and I was assured it was.

I remain discombobulated.

Too many questions for me to feel anything else.

I’m sure all will be settled on Monday.

That’s my hope at least.

 

 

 

Posted in Life

Un/scrambled

Posted on by Sharon

You  might think this is a post about eggs.

It isn’t.

It’s a post about ideas … or maybe not ideas so much as thoughts.

Or threads, but not of the clothes variety.

As an introvert I have a very quiet outer world – I’m not the ‘greeter’ – you know the one, the person who exuberantly says hello to everyone in the office each morning, or the one who bounces up to each person at a party to welcome them even if they aren’t the host.

I’m going out on a limb there you realise. I’m such an introvert that I don’t go to parties – apart from the one I’m going to today. But that’s different because that’s my eldest granddaughter’s birthday party and the only other people there will be my children and grandchildren. Maybe an odd friend or extended family member as well, but ostensibly a family party.

Family parties, when everyone there is an introvert, are interesting, particularly when there’s so much family.

Only three of my five children will be there, but between the three of them they have 10 children, plus four steps. It makes for a lot of people – who, yes, are all related, but who have more conversations going on in their heads than from their mouths.

I’m making it sound as though we stand aroung not talking, and that’s not the case at all. We talk non-stop. We’re just all so worn out at the end of it from talking so much that we need alone time to recharge.

But I digress.

Scrambled.

Thoughts.

Threads.

My sister wrote a comment on my previous blog post along the lines of ‘you have so many ideas’ and she also wrote, in her own blog, ‘I might look like I’m doing nothing, but in my head I’m very busy!’

I completly resonate with that sentiment – it’s a hallmark of an introvert – the quiet on the outside but busy on the inside thing.

And that called to mind this image I saw on social media a while ago. 

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I love those opportunities to have deep conversation with someone in which the scramble of thoughts/threads gets unscrambled.

I usually pay for those conversations, but that’s okay because the person I’m paying knows how to take the tangle and unravel it a little. Or maybe it’s because they listen so that I do the untangling myself, just by getting the threads out of my head and therefore out of the ravel.

[If you can unravel something, does that mean you can ravel it?]

When my students didn’t know where to begin in writing a university assignment, I’d tell them to just start, to put something down on the page and keep tugging gently at the idea/thought/thread through writing, so that eventually there are lots of ideas on the page and you can re-arrange them as required, throw some out, develop some further, add new ones, so that eventually you have a piece of writing that is as clear and unscrambled as you’d want a university assignment to be.

[Unlike that paragraph, which had too many ‘so that eventuallys’ in it. I could edit it but I like the forceful movement forward it implies.]

Deb’s right. I do have lots of ideas/thoughts and I’m getting much better at recognising when they’re in a tangle and knowing how I might go about untangling them.

I talk.

It’s exhausting. But ultimately far less exhausting than having the thoughts continually scrambling around my mind.

If you want some clarity – talk to someone trained to listen.

An unscrambled mind is so much less exhausting and far less heavy to carry around.