Never let a doctor sit next to you

A friend said the other day said about my blog and how can i make jokes up when I have to handle all this? and I started to think about that.

Personally I think people who only can understand what it is like to have cancer, are the people that have or have had cancer or the people around them.

For me, how I deal with having pancreatic cancer was this, at the very start, it was like getting hit by a bus, there is so much to take in, you are unable to retain and collect and compute all the information.

I think that when doctors are in training, they are trained on how to reveal bad news to patients, and one of the teaching is, when revealing bad news to a patient in a hospital, sit next to them and make them sure there on the same eye level as you, and then you can communicate the bad news.  I got to a point when the doctors where doing there rounds,  I would lie in bed with my legs spread apart so there were unable to sit down.

But after the dust settles of the total shock of been told you have cancer, after what the body as to go throw via operations then 6 months of chemo, and then the total shock of it coming back again, when that ton of dust settles eventually settles, I ask myself:

I'm not sure how I should be handling this too?

There is no real teachings on how you should behave in these situations, you have seen them in soaps and seen actors performing them but if I am honest, I am not sure how i should be acting, so you act yourself.

I was not sure how people would react to me without no hair, my mates have reacted how they would reacted if I had not lost my hair.... by taking the piss, and people in shopping centres have started to be nice and open doors for me and that kind of thing which i must admit a little, I have started to take advantage of this a little.

Writing about talking advantage! when Rob and me stayed in a hotel a few weeks ago, I did something shameful and please don't judge me on this! When placing the internet booking, I did put "I have cancer" under the dietary requirements, insane? yes probably, but it did get us a free upgrade and a bottle of champaign on arrival!

I guess what I am trying to say is, you learn to live with it and not to feel sorry for yourself or walk around devastated but actually live, yes we have bad days! we have days where we fall apart, but we mostly have good days, and those good days make it all worth it.