PTSD; survivor angst

I can’t believe I’m still alive 4 years after the diagnosis that my breast cancer had come back in my bones, liver and pancreas. I’m not only still alive, but actually ‘well’. I suffer the tiniest bit of back ache from time to time. This is an absolute miracle created by monthly ‘denosumab’ injections. I call it a miracle, because in 2012 I was described as having ‘extensive boney metastases in spine and pelvis’; I never imagined they could become sufficiently mended to give almost no pain at all.

The only thing I do suffer is an antsy anxiety that it will all come back. I’ve phrased that wrongly – it WILL come back. The only question is ‘when?’ Six months, six years, sixteen years… It’s quite difficult to live with that hanging over you, and sometimes I feel my skin is crawling all over with anxiety. I feel so tired I can’t hold my body up, but so ‘antsy’ laying down is like lying on a bed of nails (with ants crawling all over it!)

In many ways, I’m no different to any other human being on the planet at this moment. Death can come at any moment to any of us, and tomorrow isn’t promised. It’s just having your face rammed into your mortality by a cancer diagnosis is quite tricky…

NaNoWriMo Winner!

I’m engaging my ‘smug mode’ this morning. I challenged myself to do NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) this month, and succeeded! My novel is now… well… written. Unfortunately it’s a long way off me letting anyone actually READ it because I need to reread it, edit it, revise it myself first. But, it exists!

I didn’t think it possible five weeks ago. I realised it would involve me writing about 2,000 words a day, every day, for the whole month. I write my stuff longhand, with pen and paper, then transfer it by two-finger typing to the computer. I didn’t think I could physically do 2,000 words a day like that. In fact, it was proving very tough, so mid month I did a few experiments. I tried speaking the words into my Sony tablet, using ‘Evernote’. Doh! I couldn’t make it capitalise. Then it would miss a few words, so I would say them again, and it would do them twice. Finally I gave up when I said ‘illuminated reindeer’ and it converted it to ‘nominated philanderer’. (And what was I doing with an ‘illuminated reindeer’ anyway in my novel? Ah! You’ll have to read it and find out…)

We went away for a mini-break, so I was forced away from my laptop, and ‘Word’. ‘Evernote’ and the Sony tablet came up trumps this time. I typed my novel into a series of notes in ‘Evernote’. Using the predictive text was fast and accurate for me, and I achieved previously unheard of speeds of typing (for me, anyway). The only problem I had was when I selected the wrong word from the predictive offering on the top bar, but that didn’t happen very often.

I learned a lot, and enjoyed the process. I’ve only written short stories before, and it was quite nice having a whole gang of intricate characters at my beck and call. I rather miss them, now. I might have to start another novel…

Drowning in digital dreams

Isn’t the digital camera a wonderful thing? Remember the days when you had to limit your photography to 24- or 36-shot portions? Each shot had to be carefully considered. You might run out too soon and miss vital moments. Printing the pictures was expensive, and remember the resentment when you found you’d paid for one that was obliterated by light leaking into the camera, or leaving the lens cap on?

These days you can click away to your heart’s content, capturing fleeting moments. We can create massive archives from which to select the one that’s ‘just right’.
As you sit down to sift your way the 600 plus pictures you fired off at Bob and Jean’s golden wedding bash, or the 3,000 shots you brought back from your holiday of a lifetime, do you feel a mild panic? Perhaps a little nostalgia for the self-editing nature of celluloid and print?

Once you’re selected the 50 or so images that you really want to keep, how do you store them or display them? Backing them up on CDs and DVDs seems a good idea, but how often are you going to fire up the computer to look at them? In future, will your children and grandchildren be able to look at them? You’ve backed them up on electronic storage device – say, a DVD or Flash drive – so they should be safe, shouldn’t they? Wrong. The media may well last a century, but the device for playing it may be long gone. (I must remember to move the electronic slideshow I did of my daughter’s wedding from a DVD to my hard disk before… oh, hang on, too late… my new laptop doesn’t have a DVD drive.)

What happened to those things we got off a shelf? They were interactive. You could flick through to wherever you wanted. You didn’t need electricity. Ah yes – photograph albums.

There’s one potential answer in self-publishing. Don’t be put off by it sounding rather grand. It’s a relatively simple and inexpensive way to make a book (or two) of your favourite memories. Websites ‘Lulu’ and ‘Blurb’ guide you step-by-step through the process, providing templates and making it as easy as possible to produce a good looking book. Once you press the ‘Publish’ button your book will be winging its way to you in a few days.

So, instead of all those pictures languishing in a folder on your computer somewhere, you can have a selection of beautiful books on your shelf. Books of memories.

I can’t wait to start my library. ‘My recipes’, ‘Last summer with our dog’, ‘Best hotels for long weekends’, and ‘Summer holiday with Granny and Grandpa’. That last one will have to wait until we actually HAVE grandchildren, but I’m looking forward to it!

We had a great time at our Book Launch Lunch. What can be better than spending fun time with like-minded creative folk?

Torbay Writers

Torbay U3A Creative Writing Group members celebrated the publication of an anthology of their work with a ‘Book Launch Lunch’ at the Devon Dumpling, Shiphay, thus combining two of their favourite pursuits – writing and having a good time.

Did you know that the traditional Devon Cream Tea can be taken with treacle substituted for the jam, and is then know as ‘Thunder and Lightning’? Or that Reg Varney retired to Stoke Fleming? There is a lot of ghostly goings-on in Dartmoor, and plenty of fiction in local places. Would young George survive the WWII bombing in Brixham? What’s it like to be down and out in Torquay?

‘Devon Tales’ by Torbay U3A (illustrated and edited by Vicky Squires) is available for £3 plus p. & p. from Lulu.com.

Creative Writing is only one of the activities on offer from Torbay U3A (University of the Third Age). It’s a…

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Trevor Vincent – what have you done?

Just a few days ago, my friend Trevor pointed out a cracking little video about sketchbooks and journals, and since then I haven’t been able to get it out of my head. Now it’s forming itself into yet another New Year’s Resolution:

• to do a drawing – or anything visual – every single day and post it on the web.

At first quite a lot of my drawings will be for my ‘Beetroot’ children’s book project, because I’m challenging myself to do one of them every day until I get the book finished.

I don’t want to stop at that. I have ideas for many more things this year. I’m determined to conquer lino-printing, and also have more ideas to resurrect my character ‘Brixham Bill’.

I need to make sure I do something every day, even the smallest of doodles.

Where to put them?  I couldn’t choose between Tumblr or Pinterest, so I’m creating a visual journal on both.

Have a look: Sketchbook Journal on Tumblr, or Sketchbook Journal Board on Pinterest.

So, curses Trevor Vincent! You’ve inspired me to add another thing to my list for 2014.

Back to the hand

After twenty plus years of using a computer to generate all my graphics and illustrations, I’ve re-discovered my hand. Where has it been all these years?

These last few months I’ve been working on my ‘Black Hole in the Beetroot’ children’s adventure series, and I’m loving losing myself in the ink and wash illustrations.

As well as re-discovering my hand, I’ve finally discovered time-management. I’ve been labouring under a misapprehension these last four decades. It’s a misapprehension that has been a scandalous thief of my time and energy. It was the assumption that each of my days look like this:

when actually they look like this:

Every morning I would completely waste my sparkling, creative time doing mundane tasks, usually washing up and cleaning the kitchen from the night before. By the time I had finished my washing up, washing, food prep, shopping, and more, I was well into my ‘Can do mundane tasks’ section.

Now I’ve shifted things around a bit and it’s made all the difference. I make it a rule to get straight on with drawing and writing as soon as I’ve got up and finished my ‘morning pages’ (another story).

I’ve discovered I can do mundane tasks even right into my ‘Useless’ bit of the day, so washing up, and even the week’s big shop, have been relegated to the evening.

I can’t believe how this simple adjustment has changed my life? Why didn’t I do it years ago?

We’re having a laugh!

This is me, sharing a joke with George and Doop, characters from my book ‘The Black Hole in the Beetroot’.

Yet another direction…

This blog is going to career off in yet another direction. First it was recipes, then it was cancer, now it’s going to be MY BOOK!

Yesterday I completed and uploaded my first self-published book to Amazon Kindle.

It’s a ripping science fiction yarn for 6-11 year old readers, fully illustrated.

I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself from now on. It’s been great getting up really early and immersing myself in an illustration. I got in a routine of doing one a day, preparing it in the morning and colouring in at night in front of the TV.

I’d better make a start on ‘Beetroot II, the sequel’…

I might be along the right lines after all

I’m working hard at my immune system, especially hoping to get my ‘T Cells’ in fighting order so that they can eat up my cancer cells.

Research publication this week shows that I might be along the right lines:

http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn23646-antibody-wakes-up-tcells-to-make-cancer-vanish.html#.UeJ3tlMyHJIand

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/exclusive-cancer–a-cure-just-got-closer-thanks-to-a-tiny-british-company–and-the-result-could-change-lives-of-millions-8707590.html

So, there’s not only a ‘tiny British company’ working on this, there’s a not-so-tiny, short British woman doing her bit, too.

What am I doing?

• Good nutrition
• Daily exercise
• Extreme cleanliness, with daily ‘Dettol’ baths and saunas a few times a week.

The last bit’s my own invention! I don’t want my T cells chasing common bacteria around when they should be concentrating ON THE JOB IN HAND! Ridding my body every night  of skin-born bacteria seems the way to go.

All I can say is at the moment it seems to be working.

Bisphospho-bloody-amazing-phates!

As I have bone metastases, ‘bone pain’ was the first symptom I had that showed I was in trouble. Symptoms were a leg that felt strained at the top, and made we walk like a table, and REALLY bad back ache.
I’ve now finished chemo and radio therapies, but ongoing (till it ‘stops working’ – don’t like the sound of that) I’m having monthly infusions of bisphosphonate. I don’t quite understand how it works – it stops my clasts blasting* or something – but the results are fantastic.
The positive effect seems to have built a little with each infusion, and this week I’m delighted to announce that I feel ‘normal’, except that my ‘normal’ is better than it used to be because I’m 70lbs lighter. On Monday I walked 7 miles, and helped to water the allotment, which is a back breaking task even for a healthy individual. Tuesday it was just a 3 mile walk, with more watering. It’s hard to remember I could barely walk across the room a year ago, and couldn’t even put on my own pants. I used to try to don my pants with a walking stick, but it always ended in hopeless twiddling, like one of those plates on sticks stunts beloved by circuses.
I just wanted to put a little positive note up here, because so many of us write about gruelling treatments etc, but rarely write about their effects, and how sometimes they actually work!

*Bone undergoes constant turnover and is kept in balance (homeostasis) by osteoblasts creating bone and osteoclasts destroying bone. Bisphosphonates inhibit the digestion of bone by encouraging osteoclasts to undergo apoptosis, or cell death, thereby slowing bone loss. (Wikipedia)