Moving On Up

As most of you know, my daughter Nicole and her partner Brad moved back home early this year to help out whilst I recovered. Yesterday they moved out into their lovely new flat at Paraparaumu Beach. For me this signifies one thing. I am through the storm. For the past nine months I feel like I have been living in a vortex that has resolved around nothing nothing but cancer, cancer, cancer. Tossing us all around to face the unknown. Things seeming to spin out of our control whilst other peoples lives just carried on the same. And now after such a ride I feel like I am coming in to land. I feel like I have been on some strange holiday but not really remembering it but at the same time feeling like my old self again. In a strange way it feels like I am emerging as somebody new. I still have three shots of chemo left and my thyroid operation but I know that the race is nearly won. A whole year has gone by.....but where??? There is really not a lot of good stuff that has happened in the past 12 months; not many photographs have been taken for me to scrapbook. In a strange kind of way I will miss the little network of medics that I have got to know well. I told the nurses at oncology that I will have to find somewhere else to go on a Thursday when my chemo is over. I have met some wonderful people there; the nurses, the volunteers and other patients.

I seem to have become a bit of a celebrity at the Blood and Cancer Centre, it appears. I was sitting in the waiting room last Thursday, minding my own business, when the Cancer Society volunteer rushed up to me and said that she had been looking for me everywhere. She said that she had ladies having chemo who were asking whether I was here today with my beanies. The volunteer asked me if I had them with me, to which I replied, yes. She then said for me to hand the bag over to her so that she could take them down to the ladies to look at. She hardly gave me time to remove my lunch out of the bag before she took off down to the chemo ward.

Thanks to this lovely volunteer I now am allowed to display a mannequin sporting one of my beanies in the actual chemotherapy rooms. This wonderful volunteer promotes them to almost everyone that comes in for chemo. She is an angel.

But getting back to Thursday.....every time I sat down in my laz-y-boy she would come around and ask me to go and meet this lady and that lady who all wanted to meet me and buy my beanies. It's getting a bit out of control. Now I have been asked if I would like to make miniature beanies for premature babies at the neo-natal ward. I didn't know where to start with the sizing but according to the internet, using an orange for measurements is pretty close. Look at these cuties.