Sunday Brunch
Keep Calm And Fuck It!
Show me some lovin… I adore pigs… even the wild ones
I have never had the stiff upper lip required to keep calm and carry on but I do appreciate a good cup of tea at all times. I have been drinking herbal tea by the gallons which made a friend comment: Are you trying to pee out your cancer?
Yes.
I thought I knew all the herbs but nope. I have been recommended to get some “new” ones. I am already using a lot of plant based things so I need to step back and balance it out a bit. I am not telling you exactly what I use because I don’t want to pretend to have some sort of cancer curing regiment all figured out.
IN A WORLD GONE MAD…
This morning while making my mushroom coffee (cordyceps, lion’s mane and turkey tail - which is now forbidden) I was thinking … what on earth do I have to say apart from another bizarre twist in my tales of “woe”?
I am keeping the world away. I have felt alienated and there is great cause for concern. I feel however very limited in terms of making a meaningful contribution. Will it help anyone if I give my two cents on current affairs? If I address the explosion in The Hague or the riots in Amsterdam, the wars the coups the elections? Then there is climate change chaos too… I don’t have the bandwidth to wrap my head around all of that and still maintain the inner peace required to deal with my own “fate”.
No war will end sooner, no life will be spared through my words. So probably I am better of keeping my writing close to home in the hopes that some of it will resonate.
WHAT TO WATCH
My cultural observations currently don’t stretch beyond film and TV. Oh and yes the cultural observation of me. As I said before, the cancer recurrence episode, has sent me down a new path of self exploration and I crave a metamorphosis! I want to completely clean out my wardrobe, change my hair. Everything needs to change. And yes, I do feel like pulling a Britney and cut off all my hair on New Year’s Eve. Who am I? Basically I need the FAB FIVE to come and take care of me.
So for future reference: I saw the movie about Lee Miller and I totally understand why she took a bath in Hitler’s tub. I thought about it long and hard and I would have done the same. Absurd situations call for absurd actions.
I have a film on my wishlist but I will have to take a train to go see it: the biopic of Simona Kossak.
She popped up on my radar through social media and I have been a bit obsessed ever since. In a way it’s the life I was seeking in the Transylvanian hills.
Anora is another one I feel is a must watch. Is it an edgy remake of the Pretty Woman? What’s the message? I have intentionally not read any of the reviews yet. The lead actress, Mikey Madison, got under my skin as the adolescent daughter in Better Things (which I started watching because I fell in love with Pamela Adlon when she starred in Californication which I still want to completely rewatch again soon!)
I want to sneak Puk into the cinema soon to watch this film, FLOW, together, which reminds me that anyone who never saw Isle of Dogs has to see it.
This week I have watched the first two seasons of Making the Cut. With my background in fashion I love shows like this, especially because I know my way around a sewing machine too. My hands are itching to make stuff. I want Gary’s dress!! Oh and I have a mad crush on Jonny Cota (my crushes are gender and sexual orientation free… I tend to just crush on a person).
I also have been watching a lot of dating shows. This is why you will hear me chant: therapy therapy therapy every weekday around 07:30 when the participants of “on the way to love” hit the road with their dates. Any dating show makes me cringe but nothing is worse than watching people lose all their dignity and sense of self competing for the attention of someone who in the real world may not even have caught their attention. It also freaked me out a little when I saw a young woman get all clingy and awkward and I spoke words of wisdom, as if I am now suddenly a TV-dating strategy expert: “Well that is definitely the way to get voted off the island… let him be, let him choose…”
Farmer seeks wife has a huge success rate not just in the amount of viewers it draws in, but also in weddings and babies even. I find the entire multiple dating in public thing so toxic. No more datings shows for me (but I am putting “how to go about dating when terminally ill” on my to write list…).
It scares me how it has become mainstream and normalized to publicly compete for someone’s love and devotion. YUCK.
ABOUT THAT
Sitting down with my oncologist I amazed him with my medical knowledge and grasp of all terminology. After 13 years I know my way around rare cancers, tests and tissue.
“You have become a bit of a specialist haven’t you” he said with appreciation.
“Yes I know a lot of stuff. I would rather have been a specialist in something else though.”
“Like what?”
“Like pie. I would love to be able to say, I know everything there is to know about pie”
Zweemer couldn’t stop laughing and muttered: How on earth do I go back to the rest of this conversation after that…?
When working as a cake designer I actually made the “farmer seeks wife” presenters wedding cake. It was one of the best jobs I ever had.
Food in general is a bit of thing so before I figure out what I want to say about food I will just given you a list of some of my favourite Instagram chefs:
https://www.instagram.com/thomas_straker/?hl=nl
https://www.instagram.com/mob/
https://www.instagram.com/nytcooking/
https://www.instagram.com/natashas_baking/
https://www.instagram.com/waldopatisserie/
https://www.instagram.com/fourpoundsflour/
I am not suddenly going to become a cake designer again, but recent events have put a new spin on any future professional plans…
CANCER TALK
Anyway, back to last Friday’s oncology session. I don’t remember it word for word but I took the most important parts home I hope.
I have been given an expiration date, sort of. Not in the sense of “that is when you will die” but more along the lines of “that is when we will have to actively intervene to prevent you from dying”.
“Comparing scans with the last ones from ten years ago we suspect it has been there all this time but hasn’t developed much. Based on this (plus the clear pathology of the biopsy and the lack of activity on the PET-scan) we don’t expect any life threatening situation to arise in the next ten years or so.”
does this mean my spontaneous remission wasn’t a real remission but a magical “slow down”?
“We are not treating the illness but the person. And I see a person who is currently healthy and not in any danger so we are going to leave it alone.”
I am relieved that right now I don’t have to do a deep dive into immune suppression therapy or make tough choices. I am off the hook for now. I do question the status quo in relation to my beliefs of the possibility of healing on my own. I still believe in that. A few weeks ago I talked to my cells and said: you can stay there quietly until we reach old age. Just be still. But if possible, I would prefer you to leave. That still stands.
“It’s up to you to monitor your body”
this requires rebuilding my relationship with my body. The love is there. I adore my body. But I became deaf to her wants and needs and I have to re learn and re prioritize.
We are getting close to the countdown of 2024. I am grateful that I don’t have to revisit my funeral plans, as written out back in 2011, anytime soon. I am pissed off though that I have to walk into 2025 with cancer on my back again, when I had just started unpacking all my shit…
WRITE ON
Tomorrow I will sit down with my laptop and make a proper list again of my collected (and neglected) newsletter topics to tackle. The novel foods act will be on that list. Years ago when I was a sales assistant and green guerrilla at Lush there was a bit of an outrage which had inspired Mark Constantine to dump a truck load of poop on the pavement in front of the European Parliament. The reason being a rather daft proposal being accepted to retest natural substances for their “safety”. It would cost a ridiculous amount of money, but more importantly it would cause the suffering and death of an unconscionable amount of animals. The novel foods act feels suspiciously similar.
Putting turkey tail on the novel food list does nothing more than signal that it must be effective. Otherwise why bother interfering with it? My first thought was: I wonder how long it will be until we get prescribed a patented version of turkey tail by our doctors. It does dawn on me how this demonstrates my increased cynicism and growing lack of confidence in any state run institution.
It doesn’t mean I don’t have faith in my doctors. Maybe I lucked out when I got referred to the UMC Utrecht all those years ago. It’s where I met the amazing duo of professor Rene Verheyen en doctor Ronald Zweemer. They have both become personal heroes to me. Because the most important thing I take away from Friday’s talk, is what Zweemer said: I am not here to treat the illness. I am here to treat the human.
Then there are the wise words of Zsolt: “Keep showing up for the things that make you feel alive!”
I am not here to spend my time “dying”. I am here to live. And write about it all…