Saturday 22nd August

Today the technical rehearsal for the play began with a power outage on the campus. Not exactly the way to be working with lights and sound 🙂

We forged ahead, though; the fault was corrected and everything fell into place. It really is amazing to see how a group of individuals comes together, each doing his/her own thing, to make an entire production happen.

Somewhere along the line during the cancer thing, I either thought about, or wrote about (memory eludes me), the fact that the whole experience is something like doing a production (my analogy – I’m sure there are many others from different disciplines): there is a final result that it is the aim to achieve (in this case, eradicate the patient of the cancer; in the case of a production, have the performance running for an audience) and, to get there, it needs a whole number of individuals to each do their part, in relation to each other and at the correct time, to achieve the final result.

My ‘cancer production’ has achieved the final goal and has moved into a period of relative stasis, with the ongoing hormone medication. Bridget’s ‘production’ is still somewhere in the process, but is still moving along and will come to its final stages in a number of months.

So it is with every cancer ‘patient’ (I am still loath to use the word that brands the person with cancer as being ‘sick’, as it is the treatment that makes you feel sicker than the invisible, insidious enemy does). Every scenario is different, just as every production is different. And every journey takes its time and works towards a final goal at its own pace.

I am not a fatalist and I don’t really believe in a kind of ‘this had to happen so that that could’. I do believe that things often happen for a reason, though.

As we go into the dress rehearsals of this production, before the performances next week, I think, somewhere in the back of my brain, that just perhaps one of the reasons I had cancer was so that I could understand what Bridget is going through – mostly; and be able to hear her and to offer support ‘from within’ so to speak.

As much, though, as I know I have been of support to her, so has she to me. There is something amazingly encouraging and wonderful in being able to speak to someone who, you know, knows.