Depression and anxiety - the second and third condition I've learnt to live with

When I set out to write this blog one of the most important things I wanted to do was write about the aspect of cancer that no-one wants to talk about. No, not bowel movements - mental health. It still feels like depression and anxiety are dirty words that shouldn't be discussed in polite company and I find this unrealistic and damaging. And I don't think that I should get a hall pass to write about mental illness because I have cancer, it should be just as respected as a physical illness for everybody because its effect is just as real.

I preface this with the fact that for the first 26 years of my life I had an insanely healthy mind. I was a goal obsessed optimist, always looking ahead and I hadn't experienced any real adversity. When people talked about anxiety and depression i thought it was feeling stressed or sad - I had no reference point to the mind altering, locked in state of these illnesses. It was like discovering the world in fact has 4 dimensions and not 3 and I was blind to one of them my whole life.Except one of the dimensions is a nightmare realm. For the first 6 months of my diagnosis I seemed unaffected by what had happened and maintained this healthy mind. Then things started to go pear shaped. As my health declined during a hard time I started dreading leaving my room. The action of getting up and dressing felt herculean and sometimes midway through dressing I'd just stop, sit and stare into oblivion. Something wasn't right. I felt a deep loneliness as the breakup finally caught up with me and I was single for the first time in around ten years. I also felt isolated from my family due to misunderstandings around my expectation of them. Instead of solving the problem with communication I withdrew further into myself and started to mistrust the intentions of family and close friends. I felt like all the joy I normally felt in life had been hidden behind a screen and I just couldn't access it anymore. I started to take more pain killers than i needed, trying to solve mental pain with physical solutions. This came to a head one morning when in a reckless pit of despair I took double of a long release old painkiller I found in my medical supplies on top of my already mounting pain killers. As I left my house to go to work reality distorted and things looked too bright and I started yawning uncontrollably. I had overdosed and I needed to get to hospital so I didn't fall asleep and stop breathing. This recognition that I had played with fire to feel something was a turning point. I'd been slowly becoming more and more reckless with the drug Fentanyl, which is a pain killer not to be toyed with. I needed to take my mental health seriously, respect my medication and respect my life and safety. I had gotten to a point where 'nodding off and not waking up' which is the risk with fentanyl didn't scare me, and that was a problem. I started seeing a psychiatrist who put me on medication that had me functioning and lifted out of the bleak hole I was in, I communicated better with my family and stopped being paranoid and suspicious and I started trying different psychologists. I only recently found one that works for me who practices Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. The style of someone just sitting and listening to your problems that my previous psychologist favoured didn't feel helpful. My new psychologist pushes me to be an active participant in my treatment, as a big problem was feeling like I had no control over my life and treatment. Sometimes I compare my situation to being given the supplies to build your dream house, which is a metaphor for your dream life in your twenties at the peak of your life, then having someone come and knock it down midway through building it, then leaving you with drastically less resources and telling you to build it again, then repeat ten times until you're building with popsicle sticks and tape. That is life with cancer and it has been hard to stay positive while living in fear that my modified life will get washed away again by my health problems.

The condition I haven't got properly under control yet is anxiety. My psychologist said that to try to manage it away is pointless and I need to accept that it has come with the cancer and learn to work with it instead of against it. I'm still figuring it out and an episode of anxiety can leave me scared to leave my room, with a burning up my arms and feelings of limb weakness. It drives me back to my parents' home and robs me of all my hard won confidence. It's like I doubt one decision I made, then from there I begin to doubt my ability to even move or walk or do a simple task. It feels completely insane and is completely debilitating. Once I didn't trust my ability to get the bus, do my job and even understand what people meant when they spoke to me. Its's like all the connections you make when people speak went missing and I couldn't understand what was happening around me. I spent a week at my parent's house trying to pull through and it was the most terrifying experience of my life. I was genuinely afraid I would be put into an institution if I didn't pull myself out of it and half had myself convinced that I couldn't look after myself anymore and that was where I belonged. It was like being trapped in a dark horrible world where my mind and heart raced and I couldn't get a moment's peace from my mental anguish. I lost faith in myself slowly piece by piece until I was a useless blob. I've never had a bout that bad again, but I have had some nasty recurrences triggered by fear over travelling overseas. I plan to continue working with my team of specialists to get a bit more control over the anxiety so that I can live without fear of it striking me down whenever life throws something at me.

I think that pretending that I never experienced any of this wouldn't be right. Yes, I stay positive and yes I generally manage to stay upbeat and power through the days of this condition but I'm not ashamed to admit that when I've stumbled I've stumbled hard and with very real problems. I feel so grateful to have access to a mental health plan and constant psychiatric appointments so that I never feel alone again like that dark morning I yawned my way into the hospital emergency room.

If any of this has resonated with you, go to a GP and get a mental health plan. It's free for ten sessions which can then be extended. I've also called Beyond Blue in moments where I've been afraid to leave the house and they are a great service to help with micro steps in a crisis.

The breakup, or the Lemonade Beyonce style bust up as it came to be known

Ah this one I'm finally ready to right about without getting a baseball bat and smashing some fire hydrants in a fierce yellow ensemble. I always joked to Ethan that should he cross me, I would be like a dog with a bone, like a stereotypical scorned Latina from a telanovella. I would fuck his shit up basically. I kept my word, and it was only when he called me to tell me the police were on their way to my house because I'd committed cybercrime by digitally locking him out of every account he had online including his work email and I was moments away from remotely bricking his phone that I felt it was time to stop and focus on sadness instead of the vengeance that consumed me like the fire of a thousand suns. That actually happened. What can I say, I have a flair for the dramatic and I'm good with computers. In high school I used to hack the URLs of the guys I was dating's Myspaces who had their comments hidden to catch them making plans with other girls and bail on them before they bailed on me, so I was no stranger to techology assisting me with dating woes.

My breakup aesthetic. I am theBeyonce of digitally locking you out of your accounts, hear me roar and click.

Backtracking backtracking, where were we? It was decided that me and my partner would move out of our Surry Hills one bedroom and find a place in Wollongong - little did I know he was just smiling and nodding, secretly planning to stage a coup where he would hole up in his parents home and slowly phase me out of his life. I'm not sure to this day if even he knew that he was doing it at that stage. We had been together 7 years and I would have walked over hot coals for him. Had our situations been reversed I would have gone to the end of the earth for him and never left his side. I thought we were rock solid, ignoring the ways that he was slowly starting to turn on me - I couldn't meet his old fashioned expectations of a woman's place in the home as cleaner and cook if I was sick, and he had already before I got sick started to make it known to me that I was woefully deficient in these areas despite working equal hours to him and wanting shared duties. He went against my advice and told everyone he encountered about our situation, starting to become addicted to the attention it provided. Meanwhile he slowly stopped attending the hospital and started using the time he took off work that was meant to be spent at my bedside playing golf with friends who didn't work weekdays. He said that my parents didn't like him because of his lack of visitation so he wouldn't step foot in my house because he didn't want to wear their scrutiny. I was desperate for his love and support and took what scraps I could get. Things were going to come to a head. It was during my holiday to Bali that he broke the news to me that we weren't living together anymore as he didn't want to have to 'care for me'. He refused to sign the lease on the place my friends and family had inspected and put our name down for. I sobbed hysterically, spooned my girlfriend Negs for an hour then dragged myself out of the house high on Valium to a beautiful waterfall as we had a tour booked for that day. As I let the waterfall wash over my skin and dodged the pitying glances of the girls I'd met on the trip who saw the breakup unfolding I pondered the beginning of the end. It was a very healing day for my soul visiting temples and waterfalls that day and I'm so glad I went instead of staying home and crying. If cancer couldn't keep me down no way would Ethan not wanting to move into the beautiful Wollongong balinese style 2 bedroom villa we were minutes away from signing the lease on ruin me.

There is so much happening in my soul and mind that a picture can't capture here. I'm at my rock bottom but I'm ready to climb back up.

I begged Ethan to come on my 'Dream to Live for', which was a free holiday to Noosa funded by a charity for patients with metastatic cancer. He only came after I sobbed hysterically and begged for days. He was distant the whole trip and I knew this was the last of days. I'd basically chosen for my 'Dream' to be to experience the last days of feeling any semblance of love. I had bought myself my last days with him to hold close to my heart forever when I was lonely and alone. It didn't feel like I thought it would.

Me on my Dream to Live For

 I don't doubt that he suffered mentally and I don't want to get points for painting him as a villain. All I know is he slowly pulled away until I went to reach for where he had been and he wasn't answering my calls and was uncontactable. He left the state for work and I didn't know where he was while I laid in a hospital bed after a complication put me in Emergency and sobbed. My oncologist had had enough. 'He needs to go' was the chorus of my medical team as the angst was causing me constant bowel obstructions combined with my experimental clinical trial of wonderdrug Arimidex failing to work on my cancer. A growth in my chest had appeared and my bowels were full of cancer stopping my food from progressing. One night I was as rushed to emergency as the cancer had spread and was blocking my kidneys. Uretic stents were installed in my bladder and kidney, beginning my experience with what would become the bane of my existence needing constant replacement and suffering repeated infections. 

I called ethan 30 times and the phone rang out. I could see he was on Facebook on his phone, ignoring my calls. My heart ached like it was shredded. This was worse pain than anything I had endured. I made a decision to put a post on my Instagram revealing his cold indifference to me, because the pain being contained just to me made me feel like I was going to explode. I chose an image from Beyonce's lemonade, as it felt appropriate and wrote an account of all that was happening, then hit share. To this day I don't know if this was wise, but I got the sick enjoyment of a Beyoncé lemonade style moment and there is something cathartic in that. People's shock and outrage at who had portrayed the image of the doting boyfriend poured in - it was crazy how fast and cold the reaction was. He had been telling people updates on my condition, yet he hadn't seen me or talked to me in a week.  One of the worst parts was when one of his friends wrote on my post and called me a liar, attacking me and saying that I made the while thing up to get attention. Why would anyone with cancer drive their partner away if they were supportive? It was so cruel my mind reeled. I wanted nothing more than Ethan's love back, but I had to accept that it was long gone for my own health, and this guy could believe whatever he wanted. I'd lived the lonely nights and days and I knew the truth. 

 I left hospital and went home. A friend texted me and my blood ran cold - 'I thought it was weird when I saw him on Tinder'. My hands started shaking. I knew his password for Facebook and accessed it immediately, playing at amateur hacker like my Myspace days of old. There were tons of messages to girls he had been talking to in the last week that he met on the app Tinder and one he had met in a club on a night out with his mates. He said he was single and there was no mention of his cancerous girlfriend languishing in hospital. He told the girls he was looking for a 'nice girl'. I nearly vomited. Instead I individually contacted every girl and filled them in so he couldn't spread the poison to their lives then shared a screenshot, obscuring the girls names as it wasn't their fault, completing my Beyoncé style revenge. He called immediately, furiously telling me to get out of his accounts and take the slander down. 'What have you done?' he repeatedly yelled at me. Suddenly he was contactable! Hurrah! And so began the end. I took the posts down and the anger turned to sadness, a deep bone aching sadness that would colour many therapy sessions and occasionally bring me to my knees in the lonely months to come.

We only saw each other twice again after that in a beach car park as he wouldn't meet me in our homes. I was so sick that the last thing I wanted to do was hang around a car park to pick over the carrion bones of what was my great love. I was at rock bottom, a place I needed to go to to begin to pick myself up. I still feel a warmth in the soul when I see a picture of his once loved face, and I'm sad to see that his life hasn't gone as well as i'd hoped since. I don't want him to be unhappy. But hopefully that warmth will one day become indifference, to protect my heart. I realised I needed a few things - my new dog to love and to love me no matter what and to move back to Sydney. Wollongong wasn't where I would live if I hadn't gotten sick and I was going to fight for the life I was wanted tooth and nail even if everyone else thought moving into a sharehouse in Sydney was crazy. I'm sure he disagrees with aspects of my story and the mental toll it all took on him and has a completely different account, but all I know is what I experienced of it, and the pain and loneliness of those months and that's the only side of the story I can tell.