No one offered me the chance to ring a bell on the final day of my cancer treatment, but if they had, I’d have declined. All I wanted to do, after three operations and six weeks of radiotherapy, was walk out of that hospital door and head off up the street to the life I’d had on hold and even, at times, felt might be in the balance. Now I had it back, my sole ambition was to return to what I’d had, as unobtrusively as possible. For me, feeling I hadn’t really ever had cancer, or that it was a mild kind of cancer that never intended to kill me (that’s my instinct, rather than the result of anything any medical person ever told me) was my way of coping. Because getting cancer, and then going through the treatment for it, is like being hit with a sledgehammer: you’re totally floored, everything you thought you knew is changed, and there’s an awful lot about yourself and your body and your psyche that you have to process in a short length of time. And then comes the treatment, which is time-consuming and sometimes painful even if you don’t need chemotherapy, and a lot harder to deal with if you do. So you have to find a way to cope; and since we’re all different, each of us finds our own way of doing that. The bell-ringing tradition started in the US, and has become popular in the UK over the past five or six years. The idea is that, on your final day of treatment, you ring a bell to mark the occasion: sometimes, other patients and staff are there to watch you do it and you’re clapped and cheered. It’s a moment for a photo for the Instagram account, a moment to stop everything and acknowledge that you’ve been through something incredibly scary and pretty hellish but that now you’re at a turning point. Your life might continue as it was before, or it might be different, but this experience was so big that it needs to be marked in some way. Well, I marked it by walking up a street, but I totally get why some people might want to ring a bell. Not everyone seems to though: there are people out there (most of them people who have had cancer themselves) who feel passionate and angry and sore and even outraged at how others are dealing with it. There are people who bemoan the way it’s called “a journey”; there are those who hate being called “sufferers”, still less “victims”. And there are people who think ringing a bell just isn’t right, because there are some who will never be able to ring the bell because they’ll never be “clear” of cancer. I wonder though, whether perhaps what we’re all really angry about is cancer itself. Because it’s a terrifying disease, and being scared and being angry aren’t that far apart. So when we have an opportunity to be angry, we take it, and then we flog it for all we’ve got. When I was going through my brush with cancer (yes, that’s how I want to describe it), I got an invitation one day to go for a makeup workshop organised at the hospital. I was outraged, because nothing about the way I looked had changed. I thou
I didn’t ring a bell at the end of my cancer treatment. But I get those who do | Joanna Moorhead
No one offered me the chance to ring a bell on the final day of my cancer treatment, but if they had, I’d have declined. All I wanted to do, after three operations and six weeks of radiotherapy, was walk out of that hospital door and head off up the street to the life I’d had on hold and even, at times, felt might be in the balance. Now I had it back, my sole ambition was to return to what I’d had, as unobtrusively as possible. For me, feeling I hadn’t really ever had cancer, or that it was a mild kind of cancer that never intended to kill me (that’s my instinct, rather than the result of anything any medical person ever told me) was my way of coping. Because getting cancer, and then going through the treatment for it, is like being hit with a sledgehammer: you’re totally floored, everything you thought you knew is changed, and there’s an awful lot about yourself and your body and your psyche that you have to process in a short length of time. And then comes the treatment, which is time-consuming and sometimes painful even if you don’t need chemotherapy, and a lot harder to deal with if you do. So you have to find a way to cope; and since we’re all different, each of us finds our own way of doing that. The bell-ringing tradition started in the US, and has become popular in the UK over the past five or six years. The idea is that, on your final day of treatment, you ring a bell to mark the occasion: sometimes, other patients and staff are there to watch you do it and you’re clapped and cheered. It’s a moment for a photo for the Instagram account, a moment to stop everything and acknowledge that you’ve been through something incredibly scary and pretty hellish but that now you’re at a turning point. Your life might continue as it was before, or it might be different, but this experience was so big that it needs to be marked in some way. Well, I marked it by walking up a street, but I totally get why some people might want to ring a bell. Not everyone seems to though: there are people out there (most of them people who have had cancer themselves) who feel passionate and angry and sore and even outraged at how others are dealing with it. There are people who bemoan the way it’s called “a journey”; there are those who hate being called “sufferers”, still less “victims”. And there are people who think ringing a bell just isn’t right, because there are some who will never be able to ring the bell because they’ll never be “clear” of cancer. I wonder though, whether perhaps what we’re all really angry about is cancer itself. Because it’s a terrifying disease, and being scared and being angry aren’t that far apart. So when we have an opportunity to be angry, we take it, and then we flog it for all we’ve got. When I was going through my brush with cancer (yes, that’s how I want to describe it), I got an invitation one day to go for a makeup workshop organised at the hospital. I was outraged, because nothing about the way I looked had changed. I thou
0 Comments