24/5/15 I wrote earlier about realising that Julie Andrews' characters Mary Poppins and Fraulein Maria had been sort of role models for me in my childhood, and how several people had recently told me I talk a lot after only just meeting me. They do not know how I accidentally learnt too much about the 'facts of life' from reading several "true confessions" magazines in my cousins' caravan one summer day when I was 10, only to find out at school that such things should not be spoken about, and how I secretly and determinedly spent the next 12 years reading and learning as much as I could about "things we shouldn't talk about", like how to provide pleasure to others, from magazines like Cleo and Cosmopolitan. The main message I kept learning was to respond to others kindly, and to touch them the way you would like to be touched yourself.
I hoped that I'd one day encounter someone who was interested in me, but that took what seemed like forever. I had a couple of "boyfriends" in my late teens and early 20s, but they were generally very innocent relationships. The memories make me laugh, now that I'm older and wiser. I won't go into them here, though I must say that the first boyfriend, (known as "Myer man" in college because that's where I met him, my first casual job at uni) was a tall and beautiful young thing from Carrum Downs (south of Melbourne), and we didn't really have anything in common apart from our physical attraction for each other. He took me to a few concerts by bands I'd never heard of ('A-ha'. "Simple Minds" and "U-2"), and he clearly enjoyed the sessions we spent kissing each other after work. He enjoyed the kissing a lot. He was into the nightclub scene down in Frankston, near where he lived, but I wasn't, and although I was a little sad the night he rang me to say he wasn't going to see me any more, it was a good thing that he ended our "relationship". Although he was beautiful to look at, and I enjoyed kissing him, just like he seemed to enjoy kissing me, we had nothing in common, and I was disturbed by his increasing tendency to speak in anti-semitic terms that had apparently arisen from his background as the son of Hungarian immigrants and his attendance at a catholic school.
All my reading about the arts of love (and doing a short course in swedish massage at uni which resulted in a few innocent practice swiss massage sessions with a couple of the younger boys in my residential college) didn't go to waste. At the end my honours year (1989), which I spent in a share house in Barkly St, Carlton, I met a guy who lived down the street. We went for a swim one day, followed by dinner and gelati on Lygon St. We then spent 19 of the next 21 nights, and many of the 21 days together, before we got into a plane and flew to "Indonesia, not Bali" where we travelled through Bali and Lombok for 3 weeks. We parted on New Years day, 1990. My parents were scandalised by my holiday with this chap. Dad said "he just wants to take you overseas and take advantage of you." Poor Dad didn't know that his daughter was in love and lust for the first time in her life, and had been taking advantage of all the things she'd learnt from her prior avid reading with a guy who was very interested in her mind, knowledge, and taste in movies, literature, and all other things. If people asked, he told them we were "lovers" not boyfriend and girlfriend. He was such a bohemian, and had watched the French movie Betty Blue more than a dozen times by the time I met him. He left our Indonesian holiday on New Years Day 1990, to teach English in South Korea, and to travel through the Philippines, China, and Thailand for the next 6 months, while I returned home to embark on my postgraduate studies in clinical neuropsychology. We both cried copious tears after we parted at the airport in Bali: him on the plane to Seoul, me on my way back to our lodgings in Kuta. After writing many letters to each other, we met in Thailand for a few weeks in June that year. After that he used to park his car outside my place most times he visited Melbourne over the next few years, an ended up staying with me for a night or two. I last saw him a few months into 1994, when we had a magical weekend in Daylesford. The two children at the place where we stayed asked if we had any children, and said that they thought we'd make good parents, which was kind of sweet. ON that trip, he had been speaking about his ongoing love and heartbreak for his latest Japanese female companion, and then asked me if we could be lovers. I didn't know what he meant by that, and I asked if that would involve some form of commitment or devotion, because I'd spent the past 5 years wanting to be in a committed relationship with him, but things between us had been marked by his unannounced visits to my place in Carlton, occasional drives together down the Great Ocean Road or elsewhere in Victoria, dinners together, or regular late nights playing pool at Red Triangles in Brunswick St. I loved him with all my heart, but he did not want to commit to any conventional relationship with me. He wasn't conventional. I don't know what he wanted. I didn't want to continue in the pattern of the previous 4 years, because my heart was heavy and I missed him every time he went away. I can only remember him being annoyed with me twice: once on the way back from a drive down Great Ocean Road, when he wasn't happy about me wanting him to move up to stay in Melbourne and be with me regularly, or more often. The other time was when he was heading back to Thailand after a long stay with his middle sister and her partner in Fitzroy (where we regularly played late-night pool at Red Triangle in Brunswick St). I dropped by the next morning before he was to depart with a request for something from Thailand, and he was incensed that I had "ruined" the "perfect moment" we'd had the night before. I didn't quite understand what the problem was, because I just loved being with him and wished that he was staying there to be with me. I wasn't trying to ruin anything, but didn't know we'd had a "perfect moment' (a phrase used in one of Bruce Chatwin's novels)
We kept in touch over the years, and I still remember the last time I saw him, standing tall and alone on the beach at Queenscliff, while my friends and I departed on the ferry to Sorrento one weekend. I'm still in touch with his sister, and I hope she recovers well from this second round of breast cancer.
Time to sleep, perchance to dream.
A blog started in 2013 to inform family and friends about my treatment and progress for early breast cancer. Then I went and got two brain tumours,,both GBMs, completely unrelated to the breast cancer, so the blog continues.
Background and overview
I learnt more about the health system from being an inpatient than I had in 20 years of working as a neuropsychologist. I was unexpectedly diagnosed with two brain tumours on 4/9/13. They turned out to be grade IV Gliomas (glioblastoma multiforme (GBM)). After removal of the right parietal and left occipital tumours, I received the standard treatment under the Stupp protocol (combined Temozolamide (TMZ) and conformal radiotherapy 5 days/week for 6 weeks), but the TMZ had to be ceased after 5 weeks because I had started to develop pancytopenia, where more than one of my blood counts had begun to drop. By Christmas 2013, I had become anaemic and needed a couple of blood transfusions. I ended up in hospital for 3 weeks of the 2014 new year after experiencing my first seizure (suggestive of a right temporal lobe focus) on 31/12/13). They were so worried about my bone marrow, they did a biopsy. Luckily, it was all clear of any nasty disorders. It had just been suppressed by the TMZ My blood counts slowly returned to normal with daily injections of GCSF, which stimulate bone marrow function, for several months. For 17 months I was doing better each day, without any physical impairments or major cognitive problems A third brain tumour was found in the right temporal lobe on 2/1/15, and removed 6/1/15, only to reappear on 17/2/15 after I started to feel vague symptoms at the end of 2014. I had my 4th round of brain surgery on 1/3/15, followed by stereotaxic radio surgery of a residual, inoperable, tumour, on 17/4/15. I've been feeling like my old self again since that highly precise form of radiotherapy, and it feels fabulous.
My way of coping.
I choose to live in hope that everything will work out for the best. I've learnt that even though things are sometimes unpleasant, life and love go on forever. I put my faith in the life force that created and unites us all in love, across all time, space, and dimensions. I refuse to succumb to fear, which is an invention of our imaginations. There are an infinite number of things to fear, both in this world an in our imaginations, and most of them never eventuate. I choose not to dwell on them, and to focus instead on counting my many blessings, current and past, and to have faith and hope that if I look after the present moment, the future will look after itself.
If you're reading, and haven't been in touch, please don't be shy, send me a brief private message using the contact form on the right. It's nice to know who's out there. Blogging can leave me feeling a little isolated at times (I used to have recurrent dreams of being out on a limb over a canyon, or of starting to strip off in a crowded waiting room). Your emails are appreciated, although I can't necessarily answer all of them.
