Winning the shittest lottery

Hmm, so last time I got my biopsy done.

What do I remember from that time, Ian being a great friend and holding my hands a bit, Sam, Ronan, the stalwarts Annie and Annie, many tears with my sister Kathryn.

I was told that it was called Desmoplastic Small Round Cell Tumor. or DSRCT or short. Ian my doctor friend did a little bit of reading on the subject and came back with a figure of < 15% survival rate over five years.. shit.. the chance of survival is so low.

I want to take a minute to explain something that I havent really talked about very much, and it still largely applies. I'm not overly fond of life, after a pretty bad breakup and planning for suicide I managed to drag myself back to life but the lustre that once was was largely gone, having been replaced with a sort of matrix'y dissociation and lethargy. I had ended up choosing that if life was going to be the way, then It had better be fun, and so that's what I had been pursuing for the previous six or so years and it was working pretty well. Being told I will likely die was in some ways a kind of sigh of relief, and to be truthful I'm a little bitter I was not released, go figure.

This relief helped me in multiple ways, I was able to accept my fate far quicker and easier perhaps than if I felt I had things important to live for. I was released of all responsibility, I could do whatever I liked because fuck I had cancer haha. I'm also not a massive jerk so I worked really hard to maintain my giving of fucks.

OK so where was I, jees, diagnosis, .. umm, I told my family and friends straight up as soon as possible, they weren't going to hear about this from some dumb facebook post.

Then I did something that a great many people have thanked me for since, I explicitly set expectations via a facebook post which explained what has happened, how I wish to be treated, and what were effectively do's and don'ts.

I did this for myself to relieve the stress of dealing with all the random that people are, and in doing so I relieved all the awkward that you feel when you encounter someone in a difficult situation you can't help with but kind of feel you have to stand there and watch, but don't want to.

One of the best things in this list was that I was going to make a joke of it, and I requested that everyone else make a joke of it too. I'm not a sad victim cancer patient, it doesn't define me as a person. I was going to have a laugh, make light of it, give the freedom to make jokes about things you normally can't, enable hilarity through absurdity. And my close friends and I made good use of that absurdity to make some pretty fucking hilarious jokes at the time.

I'll post the original next time, and explain some of the points on it.