Who would have time to read all this?

Dearest GG, who tell me they've read from bottom to top. But who would really have the time? I'm not working, I'm not sleeping, I have to set an alarm to remember to eat, and if I don't write, my head will explode. And so that's how I spend so many hours, it no longer seems worth turning the laptop off. But somehow it's better written, gone, out.

All the leaflets say to anticipate the same reactions as for the first diagnosis, but amplified, angrier. Except I don't feel angry (maybe next week?). Found the following scrawl in the notebook beside my bed from ?May, it sounds far more heated than I feel now. Written when I'd just been back at work for a couple of mornings a week, and was suddenly part of that world that I hadn't seen for six months...

'I was thinking of writing a poem called "Really crap things that people say, but they can't help it", but it would be mean of me, oh what the hell, here goes:

"Have they given you the all clear, then?" [No]

"Have you finished your treatment?" [Does taking Tamoxifen for the next decade count as a yes or a no?]

"So, whaddidya have? Radio? Chemo? Did you lose your hair?" [this last from someone so unfamiliar to me at work that I don't even know her name]

There's a reason why the workshops are generally called 'Living with Cancer'. I used to think 'That can't mean me; surely they've fixed me up, treated me, mine's historical'. Now I realise that it always will. It will always be part of the picture; and a reason not to take life for granted, or run too fast, or not take care of myself.

Every time I make the mistake of setting a date: by 'x' I should be able to do 'y', I always get it wrong. Who would have dreamt it could be this slow? Not my GP, that's for sure; she's got my radiologist's jolly little thumbs up "Isn't she healing well?" note on her file, so she can't understand why I'm not 100% normal again.

How many stages of grief? Where do depression and madness and hysteria and anger fit? I seem to go through them all in the course of a week. It has been going on too long: I would like to lose myself in work 50 hours a week and not think, but I don't have the stamina. I'm bored with being the needy, bonkers one.

"When will you be back to normal?"
There is no going back.
There is no normal.
Not ever again.'