The last 7 years before I got a diagnosis have been a roller coaster of events, so here is a summary of things I did.
2002 - car accident
2003 - bag loads of treatment, waste of time any money! However one good thing did happen. My hubby proposed to me in the middle of stonehenge at 6am in the morning, mist all around us, very romantic. I think we woke the entire camp site up coming back! Yeee haaaaa! We also had a holiday on a narrow boat, which instilled a bug into which was later to become too good to resist.
2004 - Wedding ahoy! Well, que a medieval fest, well we did anyway and the kids as well. Had a great wedding at the marina near by and had a wedding cake shaped like a narrow boat. Getting the narrow boat thing here?
2005 - Ahh, my baby boy was born. But my father was ill. He has been diagnosed with cancer of the gullet and had a very large and serious operation which took 9 hours to remove the tumour. He survived though and even managed at this point to beat the cancer.
2006 - We moved to a boat. Through all the previous years above, we lived in a house which was attached to hell. The only word that could accurately describe it. Hell was what it was. If we have not moved to our dream boat, we would have had a breakdown, or worse. Life was not being lived in that house, we merely existed. It was hell. So we left, and never looked back.
2007 - Boaty things, happy days.
2008 - More boaty days, but we had to sell our precious boat. Playing catchment lottery with schools is not easy task. Floating residents don't get a look in, so we had to give up the life we loved and move back to land. Sad but necessary.
2009 - This was not the best of years for me. Dad got sick again. Over Christmas 2008 he went downhill so fast with what we thought was a bad throat and paralysed vocal chord that he ended up in hospital. Tests revealed the cancer had returned. Only this time it was aggressive and they were not optimistic about his survival.
They were right, we lost dad on the 26th August 2009, at 12.00 midday. I was at work at that time, and missed the frantic phone calls just before he died. They reached me just after 12. In hindsight this was a good thing, because I would have killed myself to get there. I drove on automatic, not sure how, but I got there. I've never seen a dead body before, nor do I ever want to see one again. Words cannot describe the sadness I felt. It was hard coming to terms with it, but at least now he was not in pain. He was just 60 years old.
So life adapting to a house, a big boy at big school, losing dad, and work upping gear, all contributed I feel to the biggest flare up I have had and six months on, it's still going strong.
