But out

Last night I realised how grateful I am that I'm grateful. I wasn't born like it..or rather I was as all of us are, but soon picked up most of the ways of most of the world and though I've a long way to go to shed a lifetime's accumulation of grumbles, it's such a relief to have made the decision to be on a different journey.

After the week of enforced proximity to a lot of 'normal' behaviour I'm deeply grateful to be home alone again and in limited contact with that flow of blockedness sweeping me down the drain of life. I know it's selfish but I find it so tedious listening to negativity even when it's dressed up as something nicer...like sympathy, or concern that something unpleasant isn't going to happen or 'sharing' when it does.  My exasperation is not entirely without compassion though because when I think or speak or write of happier things I get a bit more of the happier feelings and when I remember some dissatisfaction I relive a bit more of that. I know we're all the same in these reactions and I want you to feel better too!

There is so much around us to praise and appreciate, and the more you do it the less time you have to concentrate on what you perceive as wrong... I'm grateful that I have a home. I give thanks for the windows and walls, and ceilings and floors. I'm grateful for the stairs that carry me up to the view. I'm grateful for carpets and curtains, furniture, appliances and utensils. I'm grateful for mains electricity and water, for postal deliveries and rubbish collections, phones and internet at home. For food and warmth and satellite dishes and sewage pipes. I sit here day after day in wonder at the privilege of my life. My glass isn't just half full, it positively brimmeth over! So does yours. Stop right there. SO DOES YOURS, OK? Don't say 'Well of course I appreciate this or that but...' Enough with the buts already! You have the things I mention above = your cup brimmeth. You have access to goods and services? Money coming in to pay for them? Means to collect them or get them home? Someone to love? Brim, brim, brim, brim brim..

In the last few months I've been told by a number of medical professionals that they think my mental attitude has a direct effect on my physical wellbeing. Cancerchat readers will have read that this has been scientifically proved to be a myth, and I have to be honest with you, we are all going to die of something or other sooner or later whether we have a happy attitude or not. Not only that, but we'll encounter plenty of brown and sticky things before we do. It's not so much a case of squeezing your eyes and fists tight shut and telling yourselves that bad things aren't going to happen if you believe it hard enough...but believing that you will be OK no matter what. OK deep inside beyond any part of your body that can hurt or stop working (or that scientists have found).

I am deeply grateful that some of the people trying to make me better lately, including the surgeon who operated on me, understand there are things beyond their power and potions. He believes in listening to and involving his patients their care. He wants us to feel participants not helpless victims and this one reason he's so keen on getting his colleagues around the country to switch to enhanced recovery programs stop forcing lots of unnecessary interventions on us just because that's the way things were done before. He went to a conference the day after operating on me (I'm so grateful he fitted me in first!) and came back bewildered that so many hospitals are in the only slightly light ages where surgery is concerned. Average national hospital stay for an op like mine is eighteen days...in some places it's twenty-seven. Presumably childbirth in those starts with a shave and an enema and ends with two weeks 'lying in'!

Anyway I said if he needed any help preaching to the unconverted to let me know...meaning I'd be happy to talk to prospective patients who might think they weren't going to be cared for adequately but he started talking about speaking at another conference which might be a tad beyond me. I suggested perhaps I could write something, and he said maybe a sort of talking heads film of me for him to show. We'll see. A perceptive and aware consultant must struggle against as strong a tide of prejudice and convention as a perceptive and aware patient...the two together has got to increase potential for buoyancy. How happy I am to have had the chance to meet and talk with him! What a change from some of the others I've encountered like that horrid palliative care nurse who kept telling me I had to face up to how ill I was. I understand she's left the hospice now...got tired of waiting for me I guess!

May you all be well, may you all be happy, may you all be at peace...