VOLUNTEERING

Okay so I’ve basically been sleeping, eating, and popping pills for a year. It’s time to get back to the real world, the working world, but how to get there? Volunteering ticked all the boxes. I could work as many hours as I wanted, it was local and you know, it was nice to focus on someone else for a while. For 2 hours a week I felt a little like my old self again.

THE 'GET BACK TO NORMAL' LEAFLET

When I finished my treatments and was told by my doctors to start “getting back to normal”, I thought, like many as I have realised, that things would simply just go back to ‘normal’. It has taken me a while to realise that that is not how it works. The truth is that you finish and then what? With every step into the unknown there was always a leaflet guiding you through it. Though it would not be able to tell you exactly how it would go, it had a suggestion or two and a handful of side effects that you could choose from. But there is no such leaflet to tell you how to ‘get back to normal’. Without realising it, I had changed! Who knows when that happened! Maybe it was the day I was told I had Cancer. I hadn’t understood the implications of those words until now.