We Have a Plan. We Also Bought a Puppy.
- timandcloe
- May 30
- 8 min read
I am not a fan of roller coasters. Or, frankly, any ride designed around the premise of voluntarily terrifying yourself.
I’m the person who is more than happy to hold your bags for two hours while you queue up to be launched upside down at questionable speeds, only to return looking slightly greener than when you left. Meanwhile, I’ll be exactly where you left me, with both feet firmly on the ground and my dignity largely intact.
Perhaps there’s a bit of childhood trauma involved.
When I was a kid, my best friend and her mum successfully coaxed me onto the roller coaster at Adventure World after I had spent a solid half hour explaining why I absolutely did not want to get on it. I then cried the entire ride, screaming for my mummy while they presumably reconsidered ever inviting me anywhere again.
But I think it also comes down to something else.
I don’t particularly enjoy not being in control.
Which is why I’m also a terrible flyer.
And by terrible, I mean you would not want to be seated anywhere near me.
On one flight back to Perth, we hit turbulence and I became completely convinced we were about to die. Which is exactly what I mouthed, very slowly and dramatically, to a stranger a row behind me as I sat folded over with my head in my lap.
“We… are… going… to… die.”
A few minutes later, the turbulence stopped.
The plane levelled out.
And I then had to spend the rest of the flight desperately needing to pee but being physically incapable of walking past the poor man who now undoubtedly thought he’d witnessed a full psychological breakdown at 30,000 feet.
If I let Tim contribute to this story, he’d probably start nodding enthusiastically at this point and bring up the fact that I’m also the world’s worst passenger.
Apparently normal people don’t repeatedly shout “BRAKE!” from the passenger seat or apply an imaginary brake pedal through the floor mat every time we approach traffic lights.
I would argue that normal people also don’t wait until the final 200 metres before stopping.
Okay.
Maybe I am slightly neurotic.
Then there was the time Tim and I were strapped into the Jurassic Park flyer ride in Singapore.
The ride hadn’t even started.
The platform dropped away beneath us.
I immediately decided this was a terrible mistake and informed the staff that I was pregnant and feeling unwell.
I was not pregnant.
I was simply experiencing an aggressive case of self-preservation.
The ride had to be shut down. A temporary platform had to be brought in. Tim and I were lowered out.
And then everyone else had to get off because it would take over an hour to reset the ride.
The look on the faces of the two eight-year-old girls sitting beside us as they were told to leave and rejoin the queue is something I will never forget.
Neither is the memory of me clutching my entirely fictional baby bump while being escorted to safety...
So, yes.
It’s fair to say I prefer my feet firmly planted on solid ground and generally like to keep my hands on the controls.
Which is probably why Cycle #4, so far, has felt a little like that roller coaster from Adventure World.
At several points I’ve found myself emotionally screaming for my mummy.
Every time things go up, they seem to come down again.
And every time they come down, they go back up.
So let’s start with the downs.
Chemo Day itself went fine.
Unfortunately, my partner in crime wasn’t there.
Because he was in hospital.
Tim was admitted with a Crohn’s-related bowel obstruction, something he’s unfortunately experienced close to a dozen times over the last five years. At one stage it was happening almost every three months.
The frustrating part is that his new fortnightly injections had been working brilliantly. He’d gone around 18 months without an admission, so we both thought we’d finally escaped that particular game of medical whack-a-mole.
Thankfully he’s home now and straight back at work, because apparently the only acceptable reason for Tim to take a sick day, in his eyes, is being physically attached to hospital equipment.
We still managed to FaceTime each other while both hooked up to IV drips in separate locations. Because nothing says romance quite like simultaneous fluid administration.
As much as I missed having him there, I know he hated missing it too.
Which is unfortunate for him, as he would have relished what happened next.
Me on the other hand - well, this one is another personal low point.
Because at some point during treatment, I stupidly dropped my winning-tear Minties wrapper (thanks to a beautiful friend who knows perfectly how I like to spend my free time and dropped over a bag).
As I bent down to retrieve it, a team of eagle-eyed nurses immediately spotted my tramp stamp emerging into the daylight like a distress flare.
Now, the tattoo itself is one of my life’s great regrets.
At the tender age of 17, I selected Design Number 42 from a wall of questionable options and somehow thought this was a solid long-term decision.
And usually I’d have enough back hair to provide some natural camouflage.
Yes thank you, chemotherapy, for removing that protective layer.
The nurses were delighted. Absolutely delighted.
Questions quickly followed.
“Did you also have a belly button piercing with a hanging jewel?”
Of course I did.
Along with the lowest-rise jeans available to buy at the time and a G-string pulled so high it was practically flossing my spinal cord.
Apparently this unlocked a nostalgia session for the entire treatment room.
At one point, I was even asked to explain to an elderly gentleman receiving treatment nearby exactly what a “tramp stamp” is.
I also gave him a little peep show of mine - purely just to help keep his blood pressure up of course… 😉
Thankfully one of the nurses, who belongs to the same generation of poor decision-making, admitted she also had a very similar heart-shaped tattoo.
Solidarity.
The final down this cycle so far, aside from the fact that every round feels like chemo has discovered a fresh and innovative way to humble me, has been the scanxiety.
And honestly, that’s been the hardest one.
This coming week I will be having my first progress scans to see whether the tumours are responding to treatment and shrinking as hoped.
The scan itself is one thing.
Waiting for the results is another.
It’s the endless what-ifs. The catastrophic scenarios your brain insists on generating at 2am. The inability to think about anything else.
And I won’t know the results until the day before my next cycle, which leaves me plenty of time between now and then to calmly and rationally consider all possible outcomes.
All of them.
At this point, every crossed finger, toe, and remaining eyebrow hair is fully deployed in the pursuit of a positive result.
Assuming all goes well, the next major milestone will be my PET scan at the end of Cycle #6 - where I’m sincerely hoping I won’t glow like a disco ball.
But enough doom and gloom.
Because there have been some pretty great ups too.
Firstly, my collection of matching tracksuits and wildly inappropriate baseball caps continues to grow.
The nursing team have kindly acknowledged the effort I put into my treatment-day wardrobe and the standards I have set for myself, with one declaring that I can only enter with a cap that looks like it should be confiscated at triage and burned immediately on sight.
So, with that level of encouragement, Cycles #5 and #6 now have dedicated outfits purchased and ready to go.
Harry did rudely inform me that my Cycle #5 tracksuit, when tried on, looks like something only a 13-year-old girl would wear.
I disagreed. Personally, I thought I looked like a snack. He vomited.
Stay tuned for the cap reveal - though, word of warning, it’s not one for the faint-hearted. 😬
The other exciting development is that I met with my breast surgeon this week and, if all goes as hoped, we now have a surgical plan for the first week of August.
At this stage, given my age, diagnosis, multifocal disease, lymph node involvement, recurrence risk, and desire for the simplest recovery possible, the plan is a double mastectomy with immediate reconstruction and a Level 1 and 2 full axillary node clearance.
Unfortunately, it's not the targeted node removal I was hoping for, given that the full clearance comes with roughly a 30% risk of developing lymphoedema. But with the larger number of affected nodes, it’s the right path forward.
Oh, and there's a good chance I get to keep my nips! Nip, nip - Hooray!
Total side note – it’s been noted that my lymph nodes have decreased in size when they did the clip placement a month or so ago, so very promising signs things are working. 🤞
But I’m trying not to get ahead of myself here. Forever the realist.
What I do know is that it will be a big surgery with a long-ish recovery.
And yes, it means saying goodbye to what have historically been my greatest natural assets.
Not a sentence I ever imagined writing. Nor one I expected to be discussing in such detail with a room full of medical professionals, most of whom have now spent considerably more time thinking about my breasts than I ever have. I should be flattered.
But at this point in my life, the outcome matters far more than the equipment.
And most importantly, we now have a plan. That's worth a lot more than a decent rack.
And then there is the final "up".
Meet Mr Muncy...
Muncy, whose name pairs perfectly with our cat Mookie (those baseball family friends of ours will get the references), is a Golden Cavalier (a Mini Retriever) who is currently only a few weeks old and will be joining our family just as I finish chemotherapy and before surgery.
Because apparently what our lives needed right now was a puppy.
Yes.
We are aware this sounds insane. It is. And we are.
It also wasn’t an easy decision.
In fact, I’m not sure it’s one we would have been ready for if life hadn’t thrown us this particular curveball.
Only last week we were holding a little candlelight vigil to mark six months since losing our beloved Hank.
Even writing that still makes me teary.
He really was the goodest of boys and I wish every day that he was still here for cuddles.
But somewhere amongst all the chaos and uncertainty, Muncy has given us something we’ve been struggling to find.
A future.
I’ve become so hesitant to think too far ahead.
To plan.
To imagine what one year, two years or five years from now might look like.
Cancer has a way of shrinking your world down to the next appointment, the next scan, the next cycle.
But Muncy’s arrival gives us permission to look forward again.
To think beyond treatment.
To imagine the future.
Even if that future is mostly chewing furniture, puppy breath and wondering why we thought this was ever a sensible idea.
We are so excited to open our home, lives, and hearts again with this arrival and aboslutely love him already.
So that’s Cycle 4 so far.
The ups.
The downs.
The emotional roller coaster I’d quite like to get off now, thanks. I’d happily swap it for some nice, stable ground.
Even if that ground comes covered in pee pads.
Oh boy... What have we done?
Photos from Cycle #4
This blog is to allow me to write a little more about it along the way. Partly to keep friends and family updated, and partly because writing has always been how I make sense of things.
Comments