It's My Life

It's my life
It's now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
I just want to live while I'm alive
(It's my life)
My heart is like an open highway
Like Frankie said
I did it my way
I just want to live while I'm alive
It's my life – Bon Jovi

When you've been told that you have a life threatening disease, its easy to forget that you still have a life to live. Everything starts to resolve around the cancer and you forget that you are still a person and not a walking statistic.

"With the surgery, I can give you two or three years".

A few weeks ago, I had a pretty shitty appointment with a surgeon. From the moment I was diagnosed I was told that surgery was not an option and chemo was all we could do. But now, a surgeon has looked at my scans and decided that surgery on my liver is a possibility. The appointment was to discuss the surgery, what it would involve, recovery time etc and to meet the surgeon. However, that's not really what happened. Rather than focus on the surgery, the surgeon decided to tell me how long I would live with and without the surgery based on his "expert opinion". Finding out I could be having surgery was a shock, but also being given a timeline just made the entire appointment worse. My oncologist hasn't even told me this as he doesn't know and wouldn't want to give me false hope. So how could this surgeon possibly know something that my oncologist doesn't and why did he feel the need to throw me in the deep end without some floaties? I'm only at the beginning of my treatment so hearing this news has really thrown me.

The news really affected me and I wallowed in my self-pity for a few days before I remembered that I still have a life to live. I'm not going to life forever, no-one is, so I might as well get off my pity train and live my life, and live it my way. 

A few days after this appointment, my amazing friend Ellie came over from Sydney and kept me distracted for a few days. It was so refreshing to get out of the house, and not for another hospital appointment, but to actually do something for me. I spent too much money shopping (face palm), had a relaxing spa, which helped with the aches and pains from chemo, and just generally enjoyed being ME again. So to Ellie, thank you for visiting and keeping me distracted, thank you for letting me be me again and thank you for being you! I also went to the pub with my crazy family. I played pool, which I'm not very good at, I had a few drinks, laughed, danced, sang and watched my mama sing and dance (slightly embarrassing). These few days weren't about the cancer, it was about me enjoying my life with friends and my weird family. For the first time since I was diagnosed, I didn't feel like the girl with cancer...

Yes I'm sick but that doesn't mean I have to live my life as a sick person. My life does not have to resolve around cancer and it doesn't have to define me. I don't have to live as the girl with cancer, I can just be Tiana. So whether I only have 3 years or 60 years to live, I'm going to live my life and do the things that I want to do.

"I Refuse to Sink".

I refuse to be defined by my cancer. I refuse to let the cancer control my life. I refuse to live my life as a cancer patient. And I refuse to let the cancer beat me. This is why I got this tattoo. I want everyone to know that I REFUSE TO SINK. I'm going to live my best life, whether that means getting tattoos or going bungy jumping, but I'm going to do what I want, when I want and it'll all be for me. It's taken some time for me to realise that I can have cancer and still be myself, and that I can live my life the best way I can. So I'm going to come up with a list, a Bucket List if you will, of things that I want to do, things I want to see and I plan on ticking each one of these things off. At the end of my life I want to be able to say that I did it, and I did it my way. 

This is my one and only life, and it's now or never. I just want to live while I'm alive.