The Reawakening
The return to consciousness after they’ve switched you off for a bit is less of an abrupt awakening and more of a gradual, fuzzy, emergence from thick fog. You’re not entirely sure which bodily functions are still yours and which are just temporarily being run by machines attached to you with an alarming number of tubes.
The Main Event
It’s a remarkable thing, really. One of the most momentous events of your life involves handing over the keys to your entire self to a collection of strangers, most of whom you’ll never meet, whilst your memory of the whole thing will be lost to the effects of drugs that contain more words than is entirely healthy.
The Night Before
There’s nothing profound to say about facing something like this. It isn’t heroic or brave; it’s necessary.
An Unwelcome Friend: Part 5
One of the hardest things to handle is when you keep getting pieces of news that are neither good nor bad, yet somehow manage to be both at exactly the same time.
An Unwelcome Friend: Part 4
The funniest thing about this whole saga is how certain words seem to never be said. Words like cancer become almost charming euphemisms and notions of a bad diagnosis become something "quite undesirable," leaving you feeling more uncertain than if someone just said the words.
An Unwelcome Friend: Part 3
The problem with some sayings, especially ones like "no news is good news" is that it's entirely misunderstood as a concept and is more an expression of hope than fact, what the saying should be is "no news is missed news".
An Unwelcome Friend: Part 2
After the finger escapade, I kind of assumed life would slowly return to its usual rhythm of mildly chaotic normalcy, albeit with the addition of a bunch of injections and an added 200 or so daily decisions to make, and in a way it had.
An Unwelcome Friend: Part 1
It may sound like a cliché, but the old saying that you go into hospital with one thing and come out with several others is surprisingly true. In my case, I was introduced to a supply of rather decent needles and a tonne of insulin for previously undiagnosed diabetes. However, in a classic Mark-shaped plot twist, I also left with one less thing: the distal phalanx of my left index finger.