The Reality.

“The pain is killing me!” I complained, holding onto my leg.  

“Go take some pain killers.” Faisal replied.

“No, I mean literally killing me. There is a tumour in my pelvis, and it is killing me.”

My hilarious joke fell on deaf ears, as Faisal gave me one of his ‘shouldn’t you know better?’ looks (which I later learnt was actually his ‘what are you going on about’ looks, as he hadn’t understood the joke).  

It wasn’t the first time I had cracked a rather inappropriate joke about my illness, although in all fairness, a lot of people act like I’m completely okay, not least of all the team at the Teenage and Young Adults ward at the Macmillan centre at UCLH. Now, don’t get me wrong, they are a lovely bunch; the doctors, nurses and the volunteers who are present almost every day, doing activities with the patients and their families, but sometimes it comes across like these activities are part of a plan to distract the patients from what really is going on. Every couple of weeks there will be a new project to work on, and everyone will be encouraged to join in and contribute.

So one day, whilst doing one of these activities (poem writing, which I was successfully pulled into doing, although rather disappointingly, I lost the poems after writing them), one of the other patients made his way over to our table. I had seen him once before, but had not gotten round to sharing names or stories. Clearly he was a very popular figure amongst the volunteers, as they all immediately got up and started chatting with him, and asking about other patients. I wasn’t eavesdropping – I promise I wasn’t – but when one of the volunteers asked him about a certain patient, he went quiet, and whispered ‘She passed away.’ The group went silent, as if paying their respects.

It was then, after a long time, that I was reminded of how serious my situation was. No, this wasn’t just some illness I was living with, and it definitely wasn’t some illness I should forget about. This was life-threatening. And no matter how much I try to distract myself, the reality of the situation is this – I am terminally ill, and there is nothing that can be done about it.

Lesson of the Day:

- It is easy to lose track of reality, but it will catch up with you, and when it does, just make sure you’ve prepared yourself.