Victoria's Pride Parade

As Canadians we love to celebrate our friends and family who identify as gay, bisexual, transgendered or anything else. A few years ago when I moved into the city I realized I was only a few blocks from the Pride Parade. I'm not a fan of parades and avoid them whenever possible but when I walked up to Pride I was overjoyed to see all manner of people, dressed in wigs, glitter, rollerskates and not wearing much else.

Music pumps as thousands of smiling parade participants and onlookers line the streets. I'm a huge fan of creativity and there is something special about Pride that allows people to be themselves, even if that is wearing a blue wig and body glitter.

That day 2 years ago I found myself with my camera, dancing down the street behind the last float with the best sound system. One of my dreams has always been to dance in the streets of Brazil, Victoria filled the bill for me. As the parade passes, the parade watchers follow behind and end up at a large field where there is food, a beer garden and lots of entertainment for all ages.

This particular year I managed to get one of my best friends to come with me and she had a blast. The float was traveling extra fast this year and I'm so tired from work that I could barely keep up to it's blasting speakers. She, on the other hand, managed to be pirouetting down the street. I joked to her that there was probably already video of us online as we were at the head of literally thousands of people. Glancing at the street behind us was a real trip. Anyway, the second she could, she checked and found this footage. I come into view at 32 seconds. I'm in black with orange flowers in my hair and she is the one spinning. Man do I look tired. The world famous Empress is in the background.

The really cool thing about it is two of my Adventure List items are right in front of us. I want to try burlesque with the Cheescake Burlesque troupe, which are the women in pink and red with the parasoles. I also want to roll with the Eves of Destruction, a roller derby team which are in the purple shirts and on roller skates.

We then hit the beer garden which has always been off limits to me as I have always been with a gaggle of small boys. Not this year! I was kid free except for my friends newly minted gay son. He found his friends and disappeared into the crowd leaving us to misbehave without him. As our children become older it feels like our roles are reversing. They get more responsible and give us heck for having fun, or that's how it feels. It's just weird when they give the "tsk tsk, there she goes again".

Tangent #1, I biked to a friend's get together a few weeks ago and called to check in with my youngest son before I headed home. He had a fit when he found out I was biking home on the trail in the dark. He refused to let me ride home. He had such a fit that I promised him I wouldn't ride, put the bike in the back of a friend's truck and sulked as they gave me a ride home.

So we danced through the streets to the beer garden where we had a few drinks sitting on the grass watching the hilarity of the stage shows. My favourite was, Miss Vicky, singing, "I'm just a White Trash Drag Queen". Actually the best, best part of all was the security guard who didn't want to let me in without ID. I said in exasperation, "I'm 38 years old!" and my friend said, "Can our wrinkles please let us in?" BINGO! He reluctantly let us in.

Tangent #2 Last year I went to the beer garden with friends and didn't have my ID. When I got to the security guard and told him that I didn't bring my ID he said, "No problem, you definitely look old". If that wasn't embarrassing enough everyone in the loooong line behind me heard what he said and there was a collective ,"Ooooooooh," from the audience as they felt my pain and embarrassment. 'Burn', as my kids would say.

The revelry ended when her we found her son on the other side of the chain link fence giving us his "lets' go" face. We motioned that we'd be 15 more minutes, so he stood there staring at us for 15 more minutes willing us to leave. We could feel the weight of his scowl so we left. He was our gay muse after all.

In his hand were a pair of pink fairy wings so we know he had some fun when we weren't looking. My story would have ended there if I hadn't done a face plant on the concrete on the way home. My fall was one part exhaustion (I tend to trip when I'm tired nowadays), one part a new pair of shoes that were a bit trippy, and 2 parts alcohol. My friend's poor son not only was mad that his mom was too intoxicated to drive him home but had the job of pulling me off the pavement. "tsk, tsk".

I left Pride with fond memories, a free T-shirt and huge scrapes and bruises on my leg. Like I said to another friend's 5 year old daughter the other day who was showing me her bruised knees, 'when you have bruises it means your having fun.'

My Life as a Kick-Ass Cancer Survivor

So now that I have celebrated my 4th year post stem cell transplant and left cancer far behind I have a new feeling coming over me.

It feels like a warm, gentle summer breeze sliding over my skin. Like the cotton from the poplar tree that looks like summer snow, it fills me with a sense of calm wonder.

It's a gentle sense of relief.

As cancer patients we are always on alert to our bodies and the grim reality of how close we may be to have something fatal happen, even when the cancer is gone. Stepping out into life when the chemo stops feels a lot like going about our lives pretending we can't feel the breath of death on our necks. No one seems to understand. In fact they can't understand unless they have been through it themselves. There's always the anxiety of wondering if that's another lump or in my case if the weeks blood test results will show blasts.

Truthfully it's hard for me to even think the words blast much less type it here. I scour my blood test results, once a month now, looking to see if there is any odd morphology results. When the the results say they were sent for further analysis because something was off I feel the light pricking of horror. I can see the distress my organs are in due to the graft vs host but I ignore it and go on. When I don't hear anything in a few weeks I relax a little because no news is always good news.

When I was able to leave the hospital after my transplant I refused to give fear the time of day. I refused to let it rule me, I refused to let my mind wander to the 'what' if's, and I refused to dwell on it. Fuck fear. If I was going to die tomorrow I wasn't going to waste my time going out that way.

My life is MY LIFE and I will always keep it that way. It's kind of hard to maintain that stance when you hear of acquaintances predicting your death, have excommunicated 'friends' call your parents asking to let them know if the cancer comes back and a lot of other bullshit that goes down.

This shit is hard. Living post cancer is hard.

Well, my 4th rebirthday felt like a release. I know the first 3 years statistically are the ones to mostly likely have a recurrence. Cancer patients are weighed down with a lot of stats. Before my transplant I thought, "fuck the statistics', but then I realized the the stats came from the hospital I was in. Out of all the hundreds of people that go through their doors, a certain number don't go back out. They weren't just random numbers.

As I went through the process of the chemo and my transplant, the people who I had spent all my time with in hospital, and had gotten to know, died. One by one, they died. People my age, people with spouses and children. How do you deal with that? I felt terror and guilt and anger and grief all while trying to stay alive. I lay awake in the hospital aware that the nurses were listening to me breathe and while they did that I was petrified that I would stop breathing.

When they passed on, I pacified myself by saying over and over that they unfortunately were taking the bad part of the stats for me and I was the percentage that would live. I was right. I may not be at my 5 year point yet but I know I am right.

As hard as I tried to get though all this without having deep effects, I have failed. But is that a bad thing?

I grieved and wondered why I was left while others were gone. I am completely aware that it's survivor guilt but that doesn't do anything to alleviate it. I'm so sorry. To the beautiful people I had the privilege of knowing and sharing that intimate time of our lives with, I'm so sorry that you had to go while I stayed.

But I am here.

AML is a brutal cancer but I stand to let the world know that it CAN be beaten. Cancer is becoming more and more a chronic disease rather than a fatal one. With every year that passes the medical science gets better. The hope is only growing.

So now that 4 years are behind me I feel that old feeling of security sifting over me. Of course there is no real security in life but I feel like death has left me. I don't feel it's presence like I used to. I'm on a loose leash with my oncologists now.... the graft vs host problems are winding down. Really, I see no reason why my life can't just get a whole lot better from here.

I'm heading into some uncharted territory and have my life to get back.

I have been writing this blog since I was 1 year post transplant. It was in reaction to my frustration and anger that I was still very sick and incapable of even taking care of myself. I needed to feel like I was accomplishing something and writing little snippets of how I saw things kept me going. Through this process of isolation from the world I have been able to feel like I was still worth something.

This blog has brought me more than I could ever have imagined. It connected me to others, gave me some self worth, helped me open up and to mentally process what was happening to me in a way that was mine.

And people responded. It turns out I wasn't the only one feeling like a square peg in a world of round holes. So in a way I accomplished my original goal. I couldn't find any upbeat, inspiring, funny, slightly morbid places to see on the net so I made what I would have liked to have found.

At the time all I could find about living through cancer was misery and sorrow. I wanted light hearted and real. Cancer is not a death sentence but it is a life sentence. Might as well laugh about it and cry about it when needed. And what I mean about life sentence, is that it's a heavy experience that you'll keep forever. It's part of you.

Every experience that we have ever had, we can use to our benefit.

So now that I feel like a door has opened to the rest of my life there are some things I've been dying to do. Not literally of course. Every time I felt frustrated, overwhelmed and hopeless, I wrote down something I would love to do when I was better. Some of it was simple, like feeling my bare feet in the sand and on cool grass rather than a hospital floor. As a result, I didn't wear shoes or socks for over a year except when I had to. My toes froze on many occasions but I was so happy for it.

My list has been growing and I finally know I can begin to tackle it... or should I say experience it? This is NOT a bucket list. This a list about reentering life and living like I mean it. I know every moment I have is borrowed and valuable. There is no time to waste.

*list to be compiled and posted tomorrow, or whatever tomorrow means in my current world, which could be in a few days*

Learning How to Have Fun, Hooping Style

I'm super proud of myself for learning a few things about hooping, so I made a video. I had to gather up my courage to post it because I'm just starting.

The inspiration for all this came from the writer of the Autonomous Artisans blog. She knew my frustrations of trying to get physical balance and myself back into shape again, so she let me into her world of wiggling. The hoop came all the way over the ocean from Wales as a gift from Skully at HyperLoopHoops. (same amazingly beautiful person)




Since I filmed this I have learned a whole bunch more tricks so this vid is already obsolete! I have been practicing all day learning things by watching others on YouTube. The possibilities are endless for fun and skill level.

I'm ready to take a chip out of my list of things to do, so I'd better get my groove on! I'm not sure how long it will take to gain the status of a fire hooping burlesque dancer.