I'm doing something right now that I've always wanted to do. I'm blogging in a café while having a latte. I've just come from seeing a movie, so I'm having a very nice day all round. I just went to see the movie Hereafter which is about three unrelated individuals experiences with death and the afterlife. The afterlife is a topic I haven't thought much about funnily enough considering I have an incurable cancer. Maybe it's because I don't like to think about what would happen should I die.
Lately I have thinking a lot about my friend Ria. I met her online in cyberspace just over a year ago. Her father had mesothelioma and so she was desperately looking for a cure that would save him. In her quest she also came across myself and others battling the same battle. As a result of our common interests, we have been witness to the evolution of an online community which we call the Mesowarriors. I have written about this on a previous post. We are made up primarily of people with mesothelioma and their loved ones. Ria has been an absolutely brilliant member and I'm in awe of her strength and kindness.
Last week ended with me attending Ria's dad's funeral. It was really heat breaking and I cried a lot. I felt the frustration Ria had trying to help her dad in the last months of his life. The desperation of looking for a cure for a disease that was just not responding to known treatments and knowing that with a cancer with no known cure, a clinical trial might just be the one thing that saves him. But not being able to get him on any of the clinical trials that were currently being run felt like a murder was being committed. The pure helplessness she was feeling made me want to scream.
It's not always easy to keep a positive spin on things when shit happens. Apart from the online Mesowarriors community, I also belong to ADSVIC (Asbestos Diseases Society of Victoria) and regularly attend the support group. The support we have for each other is immeasurable. We also exchange a wealth of information on the latest in research on mesothelioma - Information that would otherwise be hard to come by. Information that keeps us hopeful that some breakthrough is just about to happen. The only down side of our community is that sometimes, people we become close to die or become unresponsive to treatment. So at times, it can be a struggle to keep your chin up. There are two things l like to focus on during difficult periods. Firstly, the need to believe that we will be lucky with timing. The other thing I focus on is statistics. Most of the people I've ever known with mesothelioma are still around. This is a weird fact considering that if you surf the internet about mesothelioma you would think that the majority of us would be dead within 6 months. I am a keen web surfer but luckily following my diagnosis I had no urge to google about it - possibly out of fear. The first thing my oncologist told me when I found out I had meso was that 'it is incurable but treatable.' Without googling a thing, this set in my mind the idea that meso was like HIV, a disease you learn to live with. I remained blissfully naive of the real destructiveness of this cancer. Yes it is destructive, but I can't see it knocking us down at the speed the info out there would suggest. This is good when timing is such a factor. There is no denying meso is a vile cancer but if it thinks we are going to give up without a fight, it better think again. Ria showed us one hell of a fight in trying to save her father. I know that sooner rather than later, we are finally going to win. I'm pretty confident of this because if you look at the speed at which they are discovering and understanding new things about cancer, it seem like it's just around the corner when they will be able to turn off the mechanism that allow the cancer to grow.
Now I am at home sitting in the garden finishing off my blog post. The weather is superb and life is good….
On a lighter note, the last week here in Melbourne has been full of media craziness with 24/7 media crews parked outside of Shane Warne's house due to his new girlfriend actress Liz Hurley visiting from the UK. Until now I had no idea he was a neighbour. On Thursday, I had just come back from the funeral and was about to sit down for some lunch when I got fed up with the media helicopters buzzing overhead for the second day straight. So I went out my front gate to tell them to piss off. My neighbour, Richard was standing there to my embarrassment and caught me yelling at them. It was pretty funny I guess. He then headed off on his scooter to pick his son up from school when suddenly there was a strong gust of wind which slammed my gate shut. The front wall is pretty high so I was too scared to jump over it. So there I was just stuck there not knowing how to get back in. I laughed about it at the time even though I was trapped outside - and barefoot to boot. Eventually Richard came back and jumped over the wall like it was a tiny little hurdle and opened my gate for me.
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