Month: June 2017

Pleasure and Pain

It has occurred to me that, almost always, any experience of true pleasure is always mediated by pain of some sort. 

My pleasure right now is gotten from the fact that my Mum has moved into her new (old) house.  She is happy as a clam, back in familiar territory with her dear neighbours around her, but in a beautiful renovated home. 

Before and after of the kitchen:


The house is unrecognisable, but the place as familiar as her own skin. She has risen to the challenge of learning to live in an almost new home, and has finally, after significant encouragement from my brother and I, started spending some of the money she got from the sale of the house. Mum grew up poor, and has never had money, so buying things simply because you like them is an utterly foreign concept to her. It has been a lesson in humility for me to watch her struggle with whether she should really by $150 worth of new pots and plants for her garden because ‘it is just so frivolous’ whilst knowing that I have eaten single dinners that have cost more.

Impacting on this pleasure has been the pain of my shattered arm, which after 11 weeks had not healed and resulted in surgery last week. 

Behold, Frankenarm!


I am doing well, the pain is controlled, and I have considerably more movement already than I’ve had since I broke it in April. But all the things I want to do, like drop into Mum’s for a coffee on the new back deck, or take her shopping for new linen, just aren’t possible right now, and it’s bloody annoying. I’m still feeling pleased, it would be impossible not to, but it’s just not exactly how I’d imagined.

Oh life, you saucy minx. Pleasure and pain, joy and sorrow, blogging one-handed.

Them’s the Breaks

For those of you who don’t follow Boob in a Box on Facebook,  here’s why I’ve been quiet of late. On April 8, quite literally as we were about to head off on Easter holidays, I tripped over in the garage at home and smashed my shoulder into many pieces. I also cut my head open, but the pain of a broken humerus meant that I had no idea from where the ever-increasing pool of blood on the floor was coming. All I knew was the pain in my shoulder, which made me alternately scream and moan. I’ve had a breast cut off, chemotherapy and burns from radiation requiring daily hospital treatment, but nothing, NOTHING, comes close to the pain of a broken shoulder. When the wonderful paramedics arrived, they gave me morphine, but it seemed to do nothing. The ambulance ride to hospital was agonising and continued to scream and moan.

My left arm broken, my right arm compromised by a lack of lymph nodes,  the doctors in emergency searched my feet for a vein to give me more pain relief. They had no luck, so decided to risk going in through my right arm, and pumped me with more morphine, then something else, then something else.  I started to lose my grip on reality, but the pain was unceasing. I went for an x-ray and the pillow supporting my shoulder slipped off the side of the gurney, and I heard my own screams reverberate through the lead-lined room.

I spent three days in hospital as the orthopedic surgeon contemplated surgery and attempted to get my pain under control. The first 48 hours was spent in the clothes I’d had on when I fell, the pain too severe to risk the movement required to change me. Eventually, the pain was dampened to a dull roar, and I was sent home in a shoulder immobiliser, with five different painkillers and anti-nausea meds to counteract the painkillers.

This paragraph should be all about my slow but positive progress towards healing, interspersed with hilarious tales about sponge baths, but alas dear reader, that was not how the cookie, nor for that matter my shoulder, crumbles. Almost ten weeks on, and I have just been told that I now need surgery to put a plate into my arm to support my humerus, which has not healed properly. The surgery carries with it the risk that the nerves will be damaged and my hand paralysed, but without the surgery my entire arm is useless, so I signed the waiver this morning and will turn up to hospital again next Wednesday, with all my mustered hope clasped hard against me, and trust the surgeon to do his best.

Part of being someone who’s had cancer is when shitty things happen being grateful that they aren’t cancer. I’ve had ten weeks of awful pain, near-constant discomfort and a mindset see-sawing between sad, angry and sad about being angry, all the while with the back of mind mantra but at least it’s not cancer. That was, until today, when the orthopaedic surgeon confirmed that the break was so bad, and the healing so poor, because I have osteoporosis. At 47, my bones are brittle and fragile, thanks  to months of chemotherapy, and years of subsequent drug therapy in the form of the gift that keeps on giving, Anastrazole. The cancer’s not back, it’s not cancer, but you know what, it actually is bloody cancer because if I’d never had cancer in the first place I wouldn’t be sitting here typing this blog post with my fucking nose now, would I?

And breathe …

But at least it’s not cancer.