I’d like to welcome you all to the Debinem show

~ Debra Mesecke

It’s been a roller coaster ride for the last 3 weeks and tonight we are coming down off an adrenalin fueled flight or fight response our bodies plunged into. But on reflection I have to admit I’ve been in this chemical mode most of my life. Such a damaging space to live.

For once, I’m going to restrain from sharing the dirty details. Its complicated, its scary and its just not that important. Except I will say my professor from my original bone marrow transplant 1997 is truly a remarkable human being. I am still in the process to rule out MDS (google if you want, but I intend to give it no energy & personally confident it won’t be that) but felt very VIP when my professor referred me on to his PHD prodigy who squeezed me in within 5 days notice to see me on a non clinic day. And I have to say going to the new RAH was a much more pleasant experience, complete with live grand piano, pianist!, compared to the old drab rabbit burrow of a building I spent close to a decade visiting with many long haul stays.

A friend said to me yesterday ‘try letting go of your attachment to the outcome’ and it was fucking genius, because a 26 year weight was lifted off my shoulders from this moment, before even seeing my heomotologist today.

I am no longer going to place blame on my self for my dis-ease or put pressure on my self to heal. I am just going to be.

So thanks Eminem for a magnificent song and I’d like to welcome you all to an average day in my life, my DILO. Once you are diagnosed with cancer it never leaves you. The fear, the trauma, the questions the search for answers, it is a lifelong struggle, as is any chronic illness, tragic death, betrayal or most life experiences. I get this, and appreciate every human life and experience has its own story and struggle. My DILO = Every bump, new lump, new pain, new symptom, new drug, new blood test or scan or check up, is a cause for mild panic and catastrophising.

Ahhh, but I take a sigh of relief as I share my new learning. It’s not in finding the answers. The key is learning to find a way to live, never having the answers. Learning to live a fulfilled life, detached from the outcome! I guess that is ultimately the power of the mind. Controlling the ability to not try and control the outcome. Philosophical I know, perhaps best left for another post, some other day.

Happy days xx

Published by Debra Mesecke

I was 21 and I was planning a wedding, buying a house and had a job interview for the job of my dreams on my 22nd birthday.  You see I was being made redundant and had to find a new job by August.  Especially with the new mortgage now.  It was April.  I worked for CML and my new job was a done deal.  All I needed was a medical.  And with that, just like that....my life was turned upside down and I was diagnosed with CML, ha ha, I know the irony.  My hematologist had a laugh at that too.  I had Chronic Myeloid Leukeamia, which was normally reserved for 70 year old men.  Quite rare for a young adult to get, so how would they treat it?  I underwent two separate trials until finally it was decided my best chance of survival (all be it only 50% chance), would be a MUD BMT (matched unrelated bone marrow transplant), now known as VUD Allograt (volunteer unrelated donor).  I was told 21 years ago the chance of finding a match was 1 in 20,000 (and that is everyone was on the bone marrow donor registry).  Scary odds. So being the risk taker I am I said "go for it".  They found a match and that was my first miracle in this journey.  The second miracle was, it worked - new blood type, two different DNA profiles and the miracle of medicine was reborn inside me.  The third miracle is my son.  25 years on, I now face a new challenge.  Breast Cancer.  Certainly not the first person to have cancer, to have invasive ductile cancer, hormone receptive and HER2 +, or to even have a dual diagnosis.  But this is not another Webiste about a cancer survivor, this is just my excuse to finally publicly write.  Along the way I  am hoping I can share some insights I have learnt over the years and at the same time, give you a good belly laugh.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.