Whenever I have visitors the word fair, along with the words not and bloody, are banded about a fair bit.
I used to rally against such claims because while it wasn't pleasant to be told you had Cancer at 22, I never thought it was unfair. I consoled myself with the adage that the rain falls on the just and unjust alike, and told everyone that it wasn't a matter of fairness at all. It was simply a fact of life. Another way of consoling myself was reminding myself that I was born in an era where the treatments I had were even available. Admittedly it's not really the sort of life I had in mind but all things considered I did brilliantly considering the hand I had been dealt.
I can see this time round though why it's unfair.
Before I went to study in Aberdeen I spoke to my old boss from Cardiff, Graham, and he told me to make sure I was making the right choice because he wondered whether, after what I had gone through I would be as focussed on work. He told me of friends of his that found it difficult to invest in work as much as they had previously. He was right. I found myself struggling to concentrate on the rather important aspect of research of reading all the published material on the subject. My mind would wander and I would just find anything to break it up. I was wasting a huge portion of every day because I couldn't concentrate. It was easier when I was in the lab but I had to do the other stuff too.
Being honest, I plodded my way through my time up there, convincing myself (and my supervisor Rich) over and over that everything would be fine. By the time I came to be seconded away to Belfast to use some of their equipment I was actually doing some really good work and I had convinced myself that everything was going ok. When I finished my lab time at Aberdeen I even got offered a postdoc position back in Belfast which I was thrilled by. I had gone back to do the PhD to prove a point really and the fact that someone had offered me a job doing research completely justified my view that I was doing something worthwhile. The job came with the proviso that I had to submit my PhD thesis within a year of starting, which I thought I would manage no problem.
It wasn't as easy as I had convinced myself it would be.
Sadly, what Graham had told me ages before had been really accurate. With my recovery from the bone marrow transplant I had developed a sense of entitlement about just how much fun I should have in my life. Whenever the choice arose to go out and enjoy my life I would do that rather than the incredibly difficult work of plodding through the work I had actually done and try to put it together into an actual piece of research literature. I was also working quite hard in Belfast (really, I was) and found it difficult to concentrate in the evenings when I was meant to be writing.
So months passed without my getting much of it done and then things just fell apart. Within the space of a few days everything just caved in. One sunday night my friend Ciaran pulled his car over to the side of the road complaining of feeling unwell before passing out and never regaining consciousness. He had recently had a relapse of his own brush with Leukaemia from a decade before but he was feeling fine and had been constantly reassuring me that he would be just fine. He was actually on the way to pick up his girlfriend from the airport when it happened. This obviously knocked me for six but a phone call I received the very next day made it even worse when one of my own docs called to tell me of a positive result for one of the markers for my own Leukaemia. It turned out that it was a false positive but it took two weeks for me to find that out. Two weeks where I was absolutely terrified. No sooner had that passed than my dad called to tell me what tests they were carrying out on him. We both knew what was hanging in the air and just as we knew it would, the diagnosis came of multiple myeloma.
Six weeks after that he was gone. He had called me one night to tell me had been feeling better after steroid treatment and wanted to know if this was a good sign. We had a good wee chat about how what they were doing was minimising the effects of the lesions in his brain and that was why he could think more clearly and feel better. We both knew he wasn't actually getting better but just feeling a little more like his normal self. I kept it together for a while but after he died I fell apart.
I went back to Belfast, because I had to get the thesis written, and I couldn't get anything done at home. I even tried to go back to work but found myself in front of a fume hood looking at all the plumbing work for the reactors and thinking about my dad and just breaking down. So I went back to the doctors who sent me to a grief counsellor. The doctor told me I had the signs of mild depression but curiously no hint of any anxiety to go with it. I had a thesis to write (and a job to keep based on managing that) and I wasn't bothered by it. I honestly tried but I couldn't get my head around any of it any more but I didn't care.
I went to see the counsellor and managed to piece together what I wanted to do. I knew I wasn't bothered enough about the PhD to really do it but I didn't have the guts to tell either my old supervisor Rich or my boss Chris so I kept putting it off till I could put it off no more. I went in and told Chris that I couldn't get it done and he told me then that he couldn't keep me on in that position. It was a massive relief. Telling Rich was harder because he had invested so much more in me and I had let him down. I just couldn't get the work done though and I had to be honest with him.
Graham had been right, my focus hadn't been enough to do it, but I wasn't ashamed of failing to do it. I had got a massive amount from my time as a postgrad student and in the year as a research fellow in Belfast, mostly that I had skills that lay elsewhere. The times all through those years when I found it easy to focus was when I was teaching. It simply comes more naturally to me and being honest with myself now, I was always going to end up teaching. I wouldn't do it at 21 when I was straight out of uni because for one thing I looked younger than most schoolkids and I wasn't ready for it yet.
This all happened in the weeks leading up to my 30th birthday and it just seemed fitting that I would have such a watershed at that time.
So teaching, it turns out is in my case, is actually for people who fail in something else, but I choose to just not see it that way. I was always ending up there, I just took a different route, and was significantly better prepared for a career in it than I would have been in trying to do it earlier.
And this, rather circuitously, brings me to the point I made at the beginning. After years of plodding away in a research environment that I didn't love I was just carrying on with the life I had embarked on prior to diagnosis, and hadn't really changed my life at all. That was always going to catch up with me, and it did so when it was my friend and my dad who got hit with the big C. Their lives gave me a bigger kick in the arse than the events of my own had. I got out of research and took a job in a school as the Science technician to give me a better idea of how life in a school really goes before applying for teacher training. 4 weeks short of finishing that training I took ill and ended up in hospital and I've been broken ever since.
That's not fair. Finally having the guts to admit that what I was doing wasn't what I wanted to (even if it required outside prompting) and getting on to the course I wanted to be on and then falling ill all over gain isn't fair. It's bloody not.
Phew, that was hard work but I'm glad I've got it off my chest.
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