Cancer Archives - Gillian Monks

The kindness and support I have received from friends, family, acquaintances and medical staff alike over the past few weeks has been a constant source of delight, wonder and amazement to me.

For those of you following me on this journey, I did indeed manage to lower my blood pressure sufficiently and my operation at Glan Clwyd hospital went ahead as planned.

That was on Monday, 20th September. I returned home the same afternoon, totally as high as a kite on the after-effects of the anaesthesia. After napping for three hours, I was then awake for twenty-five hours, planning my future, mapping out my winter and spring work schedule, even designing the cover of my next book and bopping around my bedroom in the golden autumn sunshine to the strains of favourite pop music from my young years back in the ’70’s.

Then I worked for three days over the weekend – admittedly at a slower, more considered rate… and then went down with a throat infection which has made me feel vulnerable and miserable with a stiff swollen neck, rough throat and cough. I hold my hands up. I should have paced myself better. Mea culpa. Happy days!

Yesterday, I attended a consultation with my specialist at Ysbyty Gwynedd. The cancer has been successfully removed. None of the lymph nodes also removed during the operation had been in the least affected. All clear. Celebration!!!

But. There always has to be one, doesn’t there? There must always be some ‘governor’, criteria to steady and balance and help to slot everything into perspective. Mine, now, is that the cancer might still be lurking around and in my system somewhere, ready to dive in and stir up my life all over again when I least expect it.

I had already been informed that I would have to take medication – in the form of tablets – each day for the next five years, also take a course of radiotherapy, have regular yearly check-ups and mammograms. Now my consultant is advising me about the efficacy and wisdom of that other emotionally loaded little ‘c’ word… chemotherapy.

Some forms of breast cancer respond very well to chemo and shrivel and die at the mere suggestion. Others are completely unaffected by it. To discover which category my little ‘visitor’ falls into, some of the cancerous cells have now been dispatched, post haste, to a laboratory in California.

It will be about two months before any further treatment of the nasty invasive kind can take place. My task at present is to recover my health and strength.

In the meantime, I have other tasks to fulfil on other levels.

My heart goes out to all the many people who are currently undergoing or have in the past gone through the painful transformational challenges of ill health. It is tough in the extreme. Personally, I have learned to bless my physical body and the varying state of my health. It is a great guide, an all-knowing teacher and a source of wonderful experience and opportunity.

Right now, I have a great deal to process and work through on many levels, so none of you – even my nearest and dearest – might hear anything from me for a few weeks. I am absolutely fine, but I ask that you understand that I need this time and space – please do not take offense. I love you all dearly – and yes, that applies just as much to the reader who has only just discovered my blogs as it does to my closest friend and is not said lightly or glibly but felt deeply and sincerely by me. Love and gratitude – along with the inevitable accompanying sense of joy – is what my private, inner philosophy is based on.

You might come across me sat alone at the beach, or somewhere along a woodland path or out on the mountain side, but I shall be in deep communication with all that is around me and with all that is buried deep within me. I shall be full of love and joy. Rest assured that everything is just as it should be with me.

I might even post a few blogs during that time – I have some ideas which I would love to share with you all.

In the meantime, a huge ‘thank you’ to you ALL for your loving support. It is also incredibly humbling. I have verily floated on a warm sea of good will and loving wishes and it has been such a massively beneficial part of my experience recently – I cannot convey just to what degree I feel wonderfully blessed by you all.

With my love.

At the end of July I found a lump. As the advert says, just a very little thing. This coming Monday, I am having a cancerous tumour removed from my breast. The prognosis is excellent and full recovery expected.

Yet there are always those unpretentious yet niggling and unsettling little words, ‘what if?’

Throughout my life I have had numerous challenges provided by my health; some have been long and protracted, some agonisingly painful, but I have never had anything which was potentially life threatening before. For many years now I have learned to accept the fluctuating state of my health as opportunities in disguise, wise guides, to be given gratitude and blessed.

My current situation hasn’t affected me any differently. After a very difficult, draining and traumatising time this past year in connection with close family members, that little ‘c’ word has given me focus and permission to leave the past behind and fully enter into and relish every moment, to stop procrastinating in any way and do it now… whatever it is.

In the past few weeks there has been so much love and laughter in our home. Every moment, every breath has become a sacred joy and my gratitude and exuberance to engage with everything around me has brought intense wonder, fulfilment and enlightenment. I find myself continually cresting a wave of energy which is perfectly formed from unconditional love, and I am completely blown away by it.

However, I now find that there is even more to my current situation than I first thought. Our physical bodies and our higher selves will go to the most extraordinary lengths to bring into our circle of experience just the right situation, activity or understanding. In this case, it has been discovered that my blood pressure is far too high; so high that they may refuse to give me the operation in three days time and the procedure may have to be postponed until my B.P. is more healthy.

Now, I have to confess that I have known that my blood pressure was not as it should be for some time; that I wasn’t successfully controlling it any more as I have for the past eighteen years, but I have had other concerns to deal with and have kept ignoring it. Now, my body has taken a firm and unrelenting grip of the situation. I either address the problems with my blood pressure or I eventually die of cancer. No wiggle room. No argument.

Even more staggering is the thought that everyone is so terribly fazed by cancer, but here I have been walking around with a condition – quite easily treatable – which could severely incapacitate or even kill me in the next hour. Where is the sense in that? Therefore, I have even more reason to give deep gratitude to my little ‘blip’ – my cancer has possibly saved my life.

It is all too easy to rant and rage against what life is apparently throwing at us. Right now, I feel even luckier than I did a couple of weeks ago. Life is good and it works in mysterious but amazingly wonderful ways which so often are not at all obvious. I humbly submit to whatever life has in store for me next.

I completely agree with the closing of words in the book ‘Journey Into Spirit’, written by Kris Hughes, who is head of the Anglesey Druidic Order:

‘LIVE! Take this life and be it, run with it through pain and joy, and bring every ounce of colour and brightness you can to the song of the universe. This is your story; make it a good one.’