Battling with Life

I get angry with the language around cancer and have written about it.  I’m not fighting or winning or losing or battling or any other media-friendly phrase around cancer.  I live with it because it’s always there.

I do, however, feel that I am battling with life.  With living.  With getting through the day.  And this I find extremely challenging.

Battling fatigue

Constant exhaustion, as a side effect of treatment, so no, nothing helps other than lots of sleep and not doing anything, which sadly I can’t do, unless I move back to my parents, which I refuse to do. I battle against this constantly.  Always fighting forward.  Everything takes so much effort.  Even standing up.  During the weekend, it can easily take me an hour to get out of bed.  It would happen more during the week if I didn’t have to get up for work.  In the evening, it can take me half an hour to bully myself into standing up and getting off the sofa to go to bed. Everything takes so long.

And today, another thing I need to sort out.  I need to get new paper work for new funding for my egg storage.  Yes, I am lucky that I don’t have to pay for it myself, but it’s yet something else I have to do.  And because I’m at a hospital that has nothing to do with my post-code, I have to go to my GP and explain to them a history of living with cancer for over 11 years and get their agreement to do the paperwork, so my eggs don’t go down the sink.  Oh, and I have about 5 minutes to do that with the doctor.  According to the clinic where my eggs are stored, they might make me fill out the paperwork myself, which according to them is ‘challenging’. If the doctor says that, I will cry.

At this rate, I’m never going to have babies so why should I bother.  All this effort.  Yet if I don’t….

Needing a break

So today, life is challenging. I need to do all these things for work and I just feel so overwhelmed and I don’t know where to start. I need a break. A holiday to lie in the sun and switch off. But I can’t afford that. Living on my own is financially crippling, but I can’t live with others.  I need quiet. I often go to bed at 9pm.  I can’t inflict that on someone else in their 30s.

I sometimes think I must have been a horrific person in another life to deserve this.  It’s not a proper life.  It’s not a full life.  Whinge whinge whinge.

Sometimes the thought of giving it all up and moving back to my parents is so tempting. I rarely see friends anyway. Don’t have the energy.  But I keep going forward.  Because if I stop, I’ll never start again. And I’m not prepared to give up on what life I have.  Not yet.