I’d actually forgotten that I even started this blog. I can’t remember now what was happening at the time or why it slipped from my memory, but it was an email notification of a new (my one and only) follower over the weekend that brought me back here 🙂

I am only very new to this blog caper so things will be pretty basic until I get the hang of it, but writing appeals to me. I am very prolific on my private Facebook page, which I treat as a diary or journal which my friends happen to be able to see. So I will *try* to duplicate that here. Because I have a lot to say, mostly about my experience of living with advanced breast cancer for over 11 years, what long term hormone treatment does to your body (especially after menopause), the mental toll metastatic cancer takes on me and the people who love me, and actually I have a lot to say about many other things too.

2023 has been a horrible year. It started out with such promise as we headed to New York to attend the wedding of two lovely friends, but at the end of that holiday I travelled back to Australia with Covid brewing inside my body. It’s the second time I’ve had Covid and both times I was sick, but not deathly ill – I’ve kept constantly up to date with my vaccinations as I am at higher risk of serious illness with Covid. Anyway, as soon as I got over Covid, everything turned to shit.

My mother collapsed at her apartment and ended up in hospital, where we discovered that she had terminal stage four breast cancer. She only lasted two weeks after that before she passed away. It was a terrible shock for all of us. In the middle of planning her funeral, some niggling back issues I’d been experiencing flared up in a big way, and in July I had not one, but two back surgeries. The first was a spinal fusion (L4/5) and the second was a laminectomy to further decompress the nerves which were causing me agonising pain.

As I recovered from that, my mother-in-law who had been unwell for all of this year and was diagnosed with vascular dementia a few months ago suddenly took a turn for the worse and also passed away almost exactly six months after my own mother died. So now we are planning another funeral and wondering what can happen next.

As far as I know (but I never really do), my cancer is behaving itself. My six monthly PET/CT scan in May showed the active spots of metastatic cancer I have scattered around my body were stable and my next scan is due in November, so who knows?

Fingers crossed that breast cancer doesn’t come to the shittiest of parties that has been 2023 and leaves me alone, for now at least……