How it takes time

Catherine
letter from consultant CEA blood test is normal

So it’s August 2025. It has been however many days since 26th Feburary 2023 and i still can’t imagine how i’ve come through. The recent letter from the Consultant stating that all is well. Recent blood test is showing ‘normal’. Grateful to all those who are looking out for me in this inbetween time, feeling like i have a target on my back and ringing in my ears of all those people who said it will come back.

How did I come through this? Why did i survive? Can i use this time to take scared and now scarred into making it sacred.

Recently, at Deershed Festival, an absolute riot of lovliness for a weekend, meeting up with friends, having annual chats and hugs, treating guests for the weekend, i managed to work 13 clinic hours. I’ve received some amazing feedback and relished seeing clients leave my tent more upright, smiling faces and brimming with joy.

How is that possible after everything i’ve been through? We will never know, never be able to pinpoint that which made the difference. Many may try, they’ll have their theories, they’ll produce supporting evidence with conviction. Those that embrace me as i am now, those that hold me in their thoughts, hold my gaze with eyes to see the wonder of the world, envelope me in their arms to feel our hearts beating, these are the folks i want to be around, those that have no words, no explanations, just love and kindness. Because that echoes where i am right now.

Words cannot truly explain the extraordinary journey I have walked through my life, most recently in the valley of potential death. Now embracing a life, not full of expectations to achieve, just each day unfurling, bringing joy and wonderment, finding the sacred in every day, in simple activities and achievements.

Emotional Evolution

Emotional Evolution

Catherine

Summer is for growth. And sometime not rapid extensive accumulating growth. Sometimes it’s the unseen growth that is more valuable and long lasting

options to succeed: plan, nurture, grow

You cannot rapidly evolve out of a crisis.
Time for assimilation. Of realisation of already knowns. The never is ever wasted life experiences

When drama bites, self realisation emerges triumphant, heralding adaptations, welcoming remembered behaviours abound

Travelling with Cancer

Travelling with Cancer

Catherine

The difference between branch line and locomotive train travel. The fear of not knowing

You stand waiting on a platform all alone. You have to travel alone, it’s happening to you, not them. Across from you are well wishers, shouting well meant platitudes, words of wisdom, caring, sharing lived experiences that bear no relation to where you stand yet are heartfelt.

Fear rising, you hope the train approaching isn’t for you. If it is, you at least hope you only travel a few short stops then be able to disembark. These are stories you ve been told. This is the story you imagine

And for a while you do. You recovery, you have time to recoup losses and look to return. Then you find yourself on a different platform, with fewer people standing opposite. Some familiar faces, some new to the crowd, smaller in number, distilled with experience.

But this time you re not so confident. Over the year you’re read about, heard on the news, been told of many who didn’t make it. And this time you can’t bring yourself to think the train fast approaching isn’t a branch line, it’s the intercity locomotive, fast paced and with stops you hadn’t anticipated, little time to consider forward plans. Can you take a break? Make time to catch the next one?

Yet how can you when the voices now holler different tones, diverse and contradictory. And if you choose to stand back from it all, unhearing, it feels too confusing to comprehend

I want to be able to choose. Maybe travel to the next station on foot, after a break to assess, pick up another form of transport, choose the most radical of all, no forward travel for now.

art therapy, colours and figure

Stone or Ripple

Catherine

On reflections. Finding notes written over the years and sharing as a way of further explaining the wonders of being mindful to the how we are being well.

Thoughts come freely when my mind is like a millpond. The profundity all encompassing. I saw a stone and the ripples it created as it sank into the still water of my mind. One suggestion, many outcomes, shorelines of resistance. 

Whether we are aware or not, cause and effect is all around us and to becoming aware as a process is part of a medical model millennia old.

Do I need double blind studies? They help in establishing empirical evidence to classify the results to form categories, from which medical models can be set, protocols agreed and referred to. 

Do I need to create a new model to bring to my wider community in returning to practice? We could call it something like the Holistic Effect Learning Programme, see what I did there with the acronym.

Or do I, as this morning on a walk with Tess, into the woods, allow the sounds and scents of nature ease me back to my mental millpond. Will I take the learning from my reactions to maintain good relationships, neither reactive stone causing chaos or the passive ripple merely getting out of the way. 

And to bring these learnings into each day, to remember the lessons from lockdowns. I didn’t learn a language, perfect fire breathing or now an expert on identifying mushrooms. What I have done is polished off my inner bullshit detector and laughed at when it’s pointing at me.