(tap tap tap)

...so to sum up, since I last posted here, I've been moving, parenting, separating, and only occasionally scribbling. I've had leukaemia and I'm six months out from the stem cell transplant my brother gifted me, one day before my birthday (thanks Ste). I'm a high-risk individual in the middle of an honest-to-God pandemic. Nothing quite feels real right now.

Naturally, therefore, the best way to calm my fizzing brain is to try to redirect my energies. I could write about all this dramatic stuff that's been going on, the life-or-death stuff, the blood and the vomiting and the crying my heart out, but honestly, I have no stomach for it right now. I worry that if I dig too hard into this stuff, then the floor might just cave in under me. My diagnosis - I guess any diagnosis of a potentially fatal illness, for anyone - is like having a gun at your head. 

We all have that, of course. One day, the man with the gun will fire. We will all die. But hearing the words "it's leukaemia", not to mention the words "you're at high risk of it coming back" - less snappy but equally as devastating - are like having the barrel hit you in the temple hard enough to bruise for the first time. He's right there and he may fire any moment, and you can't ignore him. You can get treatment, and he backs away a little bit; you can go into remission, and he's content to sit comfortably in a chair in the corner and watch the birds on the fence outside, and you can go about your daily life for a while. But you know that one day he'll be at your shoulder again and the gun will be back at your head, and you can't do a damn thing about it. 

Every time I go to the hospital to have my checkup, every time I get a letter or a leaflet telling me what to expect from this phase of my recovery, or what the risks are for the future, the man in the corner coughs or paces about, just to make his presence felt. And I have to ignore him and try to scrape my brain together enough to be present for my daughter, and try to keep her from seeing him sitting there, waiting.

So, like I said, this is all heavy and hard and the last thing I want to be thinking about. So I'm going to try to draw some new stuff, post some old stuff, and write a lot of my Important Thoughts. (They're mostly about Star Trek.) Why I'm putting it on the internet I do not know - it's unlikely anyone will read this! So I suppose it doesn't really matter if I waffle a bit. And if you are reading this, hello. And if you're not, then stop.