With all the effort that theme parks go to naming roller coasters suitably terrifying things, from ‘Thunderbolt’ to ‘Impending Doom’ to ‘Twisty Turly Death Spin’, I really think they should just get back to basics and just call one “Life.”
On Sunday morning I woke up to the news that we made our pozible campaign target – and then some! I was absolutely elated. The best Christmas pressie ever. THANK YOU ALL FROM EVERY PIECE OF ME.
On Monday morning, Christmas eve, I picked up my Mum (grandma) to bring her to our place for Christmas lunch. I knew something was up. She’d been for an ultrasound the week before and the doctor had called her to ask her to come in this very morning to get the results. As soon as I walked in the door I asked her what the doctor said. She smiled and said “Oh, it’ll keep.” My heart sunk. I’d had a bad feeling about it anyway, and I suspected that if it really was bad news, she wouldn’t tell me, it being Christmas and all (this is the woman who lied to me about having non-Hodgkins lymphoma a few years back because she didn’t want us to delay our trip to Canada!) A few minutes later I finally pried it out of her.
Spleen cancer.
She is so positive. I am so numb.
We had the most amazing – if hyper emotional on my part – Christmas. We ate, we laughed, we did puzzles, we saw Christmas lights, we held hands in bed, we made wishes, we talked, we opened presents, we hugged. It was almost perfect.
So here I sit, typing this up at Woodford, at the tail end of what has probably been the biggest year of my life, celebrating the incredible highs and not even close to processing this massive blow.
Am I being too dramatic? I bloody hope so. I hope it’s all going to work out, she’ll be totally fine and I’ll look back on this very blog post and smile at my silliness in feeling the dread.
I really hope so.
But for now, I’m burying my head in the sand (at least for this week) in Woodford Folk Festival.
It’s a mighty fine place to do just that.
(Gigs are over here if you wanna check em out.)