Strap yourself in and hang on for the ride.
Cancer has often been described as a wild roller-coaster ride of emotions with plenty of ups, downs, twists, turns and jolts.
It’s all of those things and more.
It’s a whole theme park of chills, spills and thrills, although to be fair, there aren’t too many of the latter.
Scream if you want to go faster? No thanks.
Forget amusement park, think bemusement park instead.
This is the type of roller-coaster that includes plenty of side-to-side motion and being tossed around then suddenly coming to a halt on a loop and leaving you and your life dangling upside down.
Expect glitches and ride malfunctions like when the CT scanner stops working mid-way through a scan (as if the anxiety isn’t enough already) as well as medical mishaps and the odd misdiagnosis here and there.
Riding in a Soyuz spacecraft has been called the ultimate rollercoaster ride back to Earth and, to be honest, this probably brings us much closer to what it feels like when we talk about cancer. It feels like you are plummeting from space at at a rate of 755 feet per second.
This is how my mind felt after I woke up in high dependency after a 15 hour operation to remove my first cancer. Not that I have ever been inside a Soyuz but your thoughts are racing and you feel at the mercy of your surroundings.
But not everyday is a Soyuz experience.
Some days, it can be like playing Scrabble with all the vowels missing.
Sometimes, it’s like Twister, others like Jenga and the rest of the week it’s Snakes & Ladders.
On top of that, there are no more ‘Get Out Of Jail Free’ cards left.
There is no way you can ever prepare for what it feels like to be told you have cancer. There is nothing that prepares you for treatment and the horrible side-effects. And if, like me, you are told your cancer is incurable, then nothing or no one can prepare you to absorb that message without turning into a blubbing wreck.
This is a lived experience that you go through and you learn on the job. You take some hefty punches and you go through the mill and the through the wringer time and time again. Your emotional wellbeing takes a hammering.
It’s easy to give up when it gets like this but that’s not an option.
You see, there is no quit button.
We turn up and we keep playing no matter how scary it gets.
Brace for impact, this will not be a smooth landing!