Today a friend came over, we joked about cancer. It was side splitting, wonderful, hilarious and therapeutic. Read the rest of this entry »

I saw my cancer on the ultrasound during the biopsies. It’s not nice and round and tidy with smooth unthreatening self contained edges living in an easy to cut out non life threatening space. Mine lives at 12 o’clock in breast positioning, my left breast and 12 o’clock, so pretty much its where my heart is and deep in boonies of breast-ville. Read the rest of this entry »

Someone on Facebook asked ‘why is it that good people get cancer?’. I answered that it isn’t good people who get cancer, or bad people, that its just PEOPLE who get cancer. I added that animals get cancer, cats, dogs, horses, birds, fish. They get cancer whether they got distance healing, whether people prayed for them, whether they loved their mothers, whether they clicked their heals 3 times and spun according to their OCD compulsions or not. Read the rest of this entry »

Seems the C word sends everyone mad. Friends suddenly lose their equilibrium, they can run about like mad chickens, look ready to throw you a pity-party, find a mission in healing you, become a resource machine, tell you one size fits all happy ever after stories of some archetypal ‘Mary Smith’ who had cancer, tell you how ignorant your oncologist or surgeon is and how they have found one who is much better, or how your cancer could really be a banana or sweat gland or anything other than what your doctor says it is, or they disappear altogether unable to face you. In short, your friends may suddenly turn into ‘idiots’. Read the rest of this entry »

My biopsies for breast cancer were yesterday. Chris had taken the day off the day before but turned out that was only the consultation. So here I was going to the biopsies with my good pal, Denise, who, like me, has Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). Given her dozen alters and my 13, we brought quite a few people along to the waiting room of the Radiology Department at the hospital. And then there were the visual and verbal agnosias of my autism to navigate; the meaning deafness, meaning blindness and face blindness. All becomes rather Alice in Wonderland in that context. Read the rest of this entry »

OMG! You’ve got cancer! Cancer is a word, not a sentence. I always liked that saying by the anti-cancer council.

I’ve handled that word a few times in my 47 years. Read the rest of this entry »

It was always very hard for me to talk about the ‘fruit salad’ of my parents. In the autism world there was MASSIVE taboo to speak of having anything other than wonderful, loving, well adjusted parents… otherwise one was ‘an abuse case’, everything about one’s developmental disabilities was then cast into some ‘pity box’, one couldn’t possibly have be a REAL ‘autistic’ because ‘real autistics’ were only and ever then born to ‘healthy’ parents. Read the rest of this entry »

I took my father to therapy last week. He’s been dead since 1995, around 16 years now, but I took him along anyway. I packed up his letters, objects from the different Jacks, and took them along. I laid them out on the floor and picked up each in turn, me and my alters addressing each father that shared that one body of his.
Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve always had a strong reaction to images of Barry Humphries. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1970, when I was 7 years old, my family had moved from the small rented house into a big two story house in Preston. In went a built in swimming pool, well supplied bar, snooker table, chandeliers, mirror walls, and filled with antiques and racks of guns displayed openly on the walls. There was a revolver in the drawer of the front dresser just inside the front door. Read the rest of this entry »