Day 1096

I haven’t had a cannula in my hand for almost a year. The last time I had chemotherapy delivered through one was almost four years ago now. Its pinch and push and slow hotcold ache belong in memory, in a box held closed with elastic bands as narrow as dental floss.

In a box held closed with sellotape as narrow as my fingers is a lamp made from rock salt. The label says 9-12 kg, the weight shivering in my blood vessel skin bone gristle little hands. The next day, rising pink like light shone through salt, through eyelids, a slow hotcold ache slithers out of its box. My beehive heart vibrates.

***

In a shower in a bathroom in a three-bedroom terraced house in York I am washing my hair. I pull my fingers through its tangles, and two or three hairs come away on my palms, wrapped in a shampoo shroud. Spiders like this one have been known to hunt bees. I thrust my hands under the stream of water and wash the strands down the drain of an en-suite in a HEPA-filtered room in the Young Oncology Unit in the Christie in Manchester. I try to remember that shedding hairs is normal, but the bees are the prey in this relationship and a glimpse of the spider has got them scared. With face upturned I wait for the water to rinse the panic from my eyelashes.

***

My colleague flashes a rolled-up cigarette between her fingers. She shoots me a grin and jokes that she’s going out to ‘get some cancer’. My laugh comes out dripping pink. I clamp my mouth closed to stop the swarm escaping, and turn away with studied nonchalance. Minutes later, in the quiet of the stockroom, I count breaths, count my fingers, count lamps made from rock salt through closed eyelids, until my magenta pulse has faded to rose then to black. Elastic bands creak under a pressure they were never designed to hold. I retrieve my smile from the floor.

***

Three years, 1096 days ago, doctors tied mine and my sister’s DNAs together with a neat little bow and this second chance at life began. Second chance, like I failed first time, like I have to really make this one count, like these three years I’ve lived are undeserved, an exception to rules I’ve already broken once. A clean slate if it were not for the ghosts of old letters which won't be erased properly, chalk dust on my cuffs. 'Leave us behind,' they whisper, playground bullies with tendrils tugging me backwards. Pinch and push and slow hotcold ache. As if it was going to be that easy. 

They've pulled out each of my ribs and replaced them with pieces of honeycomb. The bees nesting here are vigilant. I do not know when they go to sleep. How can I choose to forget when this fear has made its home not in my mind but in my bones? 

I mark the years because the curved familiarity of the figure three is the only thing solid in this universe of vapour and fluid and dotted lines stretching away into nothing. Even in the cancer world I feel like a foreigner, fumbling for an answer to 'how long have you been off treatment?' because I faded off treatment like a child grows out of her dolls. Three years clean. Less than a year since I last had an infusion of donor blood cells. Two months since my last blood test. Four days since my body last reminded me, with pangs of unprovoked nausea like the compulsions of an addict, that this time is borrowed.

And don't misunderstand me, I am so happy. To be in this three-bedroom terraced house in York, to study a subject I love and am good at, to work a job I enjoy with funny, kind people, to live inside this strange renovated body and reach towards the future with arms of skin and smoke, these things are treasures. Even tinged pink and shivering, I hold these 1096 days to my chest like heirlooms. But make no mistake, the shimmering golden survival you see on the TV adverts and in books and films is a lie. Behind every beautifully seized day are two more spent beating angry swarms of bees back into their nests. I have begun each of these 1096 days rinsing the pink from my eyes, excavating the joy from my buried heart, remembering what it is to live, even when there are no guarantees. I will do the same tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and maybe someday the box in my memory will softly click locked. Until then, I am getting to be quite an accomplished apiarist.

pellet

six ribs from the bottom of my chest
anatomical left
a piece of shrapnel.
tell the stories I know how to tell
and their bones malinger
undigested,
ossifying,
packed tight like a swollen lymph node.
roll up all my metaphors and give it a poke
so it rumbles against my insides.
I am looking for a flaw
on its shuddering roughsmooth surface
to pick at like a scab,
reach through layers of skin and eggshells,
to shriek over its blackboard exterior
with bitten fingernails.
underneath I imagine a new skin sheen
pink and plump and waiting.
or maybe just greyness
and fungal spores
and feathers.

uneasy kleptomaniac

the criminal always returns to the scene of the crime.
months fall from my pockets
and break to bits under my shoes on the doormat.

unbutton my skin,
hang it on a hook behind the silent sliding doors
(which they will lock at eight-thirty)
and wade down the corridor in the hollows of old footprints.

this place has both my DNAs on file.
i sit inside-out and hold my breath.
underneath the blood-pressure cuff my pulse thrums its guilt.
a fresh vial of blood like a confession
and still nobody has blinked at its aqueous thievery.
i have got away with it again.

i refasten my skin.
run my hands over the illicit years
stitched into its lining.
feel its familiar bulky weight.

on the bus home, i roll a loose button between my fingers.

the place the stories forgot

Lives aren't stories. They're just a load of things that happen. The place where act one becomes act two, the climax and denouement, they're all retrospective, superimposed by our minds. We are narrative machines. It's one of the reasons I study literature. You don't realise it until you really stop and think, but storytelling is a big part of what it means to be human. We just can't help it.

I've been interrogating this impulse to narritivise lately. My dissertation is all about narrative in relation to illness, especially cancer, about the kinds of stories people normally tell, the ones people expect to hear, and the ones that slip through the gaps. Some of the theory I've been working with looks at the illness stories that make it big, the types of tales that people like to hear or read or watch, why that is, and what effect it has. The types of illness stories that make it into the public eye trickle into people's consciousnesses, telling them that this, and only this, is what illness is like. If you don't fit the model, then you must be doing it wrong. 

There is so much of this I have fallen prey to. I've sanitised my own writing at times, weeding out the undesirable aspects, or covering them up with enough humour for them to be palatable again. I've shoehorned things into narrative arcs, to give my life a poetry it never had when I lived it. But as I've thought more and more about it, I've tried to stop myself doing this. 

Choosing to tell the nice story is a little bit like lying if I don't acknowledge that there were parts of it where I cursed the universe, or snapped at all the people trying to help me because I was so angry about everything I had lost. I have to acknowledge the hours spent curled into the foetal position trying to forget I have a body, those dark stolen moments in the middle of the night where I wished I would just fucking die rather than live through another day of this. Those days where I wanted to rip my skin off out of sheer impotence and helplessness and terror that I might never get better, trapped inside this malfunctioning body, a vehicle hurtling towards a cliff edge.

Even now, over two years later, I am not better. Yes, I'm in remission, but that doesn't mean everything is okay again. If I was going to be a good little storyteller, I'd tell you that I learned things, that I'm wiser and stronger than I was three years ago, but you know who else is wiser and stronger than they were three years ago? Pretty much everyone. It's a side effect of getting older. To pretend it was illness that made me this way is a stretch that ignores all the other ways illness made me worse. I'm more anxious now than I ever was before. I graduate in June and I don't have a clue what I'm going to do because when everyone else was starting to think about that, I was thinking about how I had managed to stand up for my entire shower, and how my hair is now an INCH long, and how I have to go back to the hospital next week for another bloody test. I was rebuilding. I'm not better, just different. 

I won't ever be better, not in the way the stories want me to be. Maybe you think two years is long enough and I should move on now, but the closure you got when you found out I was in remission is not as tangible on my end. When I was first diagnosed they said they were 'treating to cure' but now, nobody will mention the word 'cure' around me because it's a bit too loaded. A bit too final. Past the point of no return, I don't have the luxury of closure, only a precarious sense of crisis averted. For now. I don't know if that ever goes away but until it does, 'moving on' isn't really an available option. 

Sometimes, living in the place the stories forgot is really, really lonely.

I wonder how many more people have been hurt by the lies we tell each other. How many people, with lives that look just like mine, are forcing themselves to smile through their chemo because nobody told them there's another way to be. People who keep all their ugly emotions bottled up inside their fragile little hearts because there's nowhere they fit in the story. Who are crossing their fingers waiting for life to resume, not knowing that it will never be quite the same shape it was before.

So when I tell you these things, it's not to be a buzzkill. It's because I'm thinking of the nineteen-year-old girl sitting in the same consultation room today, receiving the same diagnosis. She's wondering if she's going to die, staring blankly at the immediate future with no idea what it will hold because nobody will tell her, not really, not without a shiny candy shell. I do it because I don't want her to spend hours crying into her pillow, thinking she's a freak for being as afraid as she is, because nobody behaves like this in the stories she's been told, and not only is she sick but she's also a terrible person for being so bitter about it. I want her to know that her terror is normal. I want her to have permission to feel and experience everything she needs to and know that she isn't alone.

Screw the nice little narrative. I think my way is better. 

the girl in the mirror

I think I finally look like me again.

Not the same me I was before. That me has excruciatingly rectangular glasses and hasn't quite figured out that she can smile with her teeth and probably nobody will notice the gap between them. She has hair that is the same almost-black but it falls in tangles halfway down her back and if you told her to cut it she'd laugh at you. She doesn't care about her appearance because she's never needed to. Maybe she doesn't carry herself particularly elegantly or own a pair of shoes to go with every outfit but that's okay because she knows who she is. Her skin fits her like a glove.

The dermatologist called it alopecia areata but I know differently now. My hair can see the future. It got a glimmer of the cancer diagnosis a year down the line, and decided it wasn't worth sticking around. Humans aren't supposed to shed their skins. Our warm blood gets cold without its protective shell. Mine made me a chameleon, blending into the background just enough to not be noticed. I didn't know how to be visible, didn't know the right expression to pull when eyes lingered at the little bit of skin-coloured netting where my face met my wig. The hairs on the shower floor and between my fingers and clinging to my clothes like a plague all felt like little bits of the person I used to be. Who knew my sense of self could be lost like so many strands of keratin?

A thought I distinctly remember thinking: lighten up, at least you don't have cancer.

There is some anecdotal evidence linking alopecia areata and early stage Hodgkin's lymphoma. My initial oncologist (there have been a lot, it's a special bonus of being a difficult patient) said he thought the lymphoma was advanced enough that it had been lurking up to a year before it was diagnosed. Maybe my hair can't see the future at all, maybe it could just see deeper inside my body than I could, could see the badly formed lymphocytes quietly proliferating months before they made themselves louder. Maybe my shed chameleon skin was trying to tell me it was time to look below the surface. It was trying to give me a way in.

A succession of wigs, like a theatre wardrobe, each one a different character. Even ones which should have been perfect had a synthetic shimmer, like a computer-generated avatar. Hairlines too neat, a drawing by a child coloured with only one brown pencil, a shade slightly too orange. So nearly right that the things that were wrong were magnified to one hundred times their size. Uncanny Valley. Who's that in the mirror? I'm not sure I know her. An Instagram feed cluttered with selfies because maybe I'll recognise the next one. No, I still don't know who that is.

Five months into chemo I took the wigs off. The bald patches had been surreptitiously filling themselves in, while the rest of my head thinned itself out under the influence of the regimented poisoning, leading to a pathetic kind of uniformity. The raggedness evened up with a barely-there pixie cut, but the wispiness didn't matter because I didn't really look like myself at all any more anyway.

A quote I distinctly remember from a coffee date with a childhood friend: You're looking great!

I was wearing jeans which had always been a little bit too small but I'd kept because I liked the colour. I couldn't really sit down in them. Except that now I could. Months of systematic poisoning will make you shed more than just hair. I found edges I didn't know I could have, bones protruding in places where they had always hidden in a cloud of flesh. I was still a normal weight, but this wasn't normal, not for me, someone who was used to being so soft and solid. The large-eyed girl in the mirror looked like she might break into a thousand pieces in a moment. My mum made envious comments about the circumference of my thighs and I scowled because the only alternative was crying. Contract a life-threatening cancer and you too can have this waistline! 

I longed for my old skin, the one that held all my parts together without any effort, the one that was so comfortable I could forget it was there.

Soon it wasn't enough to pick off all my flaking scales, there was further to go. First a tube in my upper arm, then one just below my right shoulder, burrowing into my veins and slowly turning me inside out. Another hard corner I wasn't used to, another way I had to be aware of all my newly raw edges. One of these tubes was fitted badly, the end protruding a little too far into one of the chambers of my heart, the perfect place for a blood clot to form. Six months of blood-thinning injections into my stomach, six months of gathering together little pouches of skin to give the needle somewhere to go, six months of stinging and bruising and staring at my midriff more than I ever had in my life.

Every time it felt like I was beginning to scale the walls of this new flesh fortress, something changed and I was back on the ground, lost in a house that had been built around me, with no floor plan to show me the way out.

A comparison I distinctly remember: Your hair looks like a forcefield!

Almost two years ago, my hair started growing again. First, an almost invisible fuzz, the first membrane that would become a new skin for my shivering heart. I still looked like a Cancer Patient for a long time, a parade of haircuts that were all slightly too short or slightly too awkward to be intentional, the slow fade of scars both inside and out, the gradual filling out of my figure into its old curves and lines and pillows.

A year ago, I got a second piercing in my ears. I asked my consultant before I did it because I didn't know how much of a risk it was, and I remember how light my heart felt when he said I could. I am wearing studs shaped like tiny elephants now, a herd of two recolonising this old wasteland. I hope this body never again forgets who it belongs to.

Now, the only thing betraying that process of deconstruction and rebuilding is the small, bumpy scar just below my right collarbone, but it's not a reminder of fragility any more. It's a reminder that I'm still here and I'm still me, somehow, after all that. At the start of this year I had the first haircut I've had in over four years that didn't feel like making the best of a bad job. The way my hair slopes upwards from the nape of my neck, the place it parts at my forehead, the little wisps that fall in front of my ears: these are all things I chose, and things I would choose again even if I had all the hair in the world to choose from. The me I see in the mirror looks back at me with a steady gaze. Her skin isn't as feather-light as it was when she was seventeen and heedless, but it holds her mending heart with gentler hands.

I'd like to be her friend.

Day 731

I’m sitting on the floor of my isolation room in the Young Oncology Unit because as pathetic as I feel I cannot spend another minute in bed. I slot together two jigsaw pieces and begin searching for the next, if only to distract me from the gnawing wrongness in every part of my body. The deep heaviness of my limbs and the dizziness swimming just behind my eyes are rendered sharper by the restlessness of my thoughts. Chemotherapy is exhausting but my brain never got that memo. The blinking, beeping semi-darkness of the hospital night is when the fear comes out to play.

The colours are brighter here. Every part of me screams for quiet but from the four-hourly vitals checks to the pins-and-needles singing in my extremities to the gradual dissolution of the mucous membranes in my mouth and throat, all the layers of this existence are loud. An alternate reality of inescapable presentness. I wonder if this body will ever feel like home again.

There’s a pizza box on the floor next to me. An expensive branded delivery done every week for the kids on the ward. It’s supposed to take the edge off the misery I think, but I only ate two bites before setting it down again. My mouth doesn’t know flavours anymore and the inoffensive margherita commits a mutiny as it scrapes down my raw oesophagus and churns up the currents of nausea in my tattered stomach. I don’t remember the last time food looked appealing. The abandoned pizza makes me want to cry.  

A Picasso body, viewed from too many angles, sharp and uncanny and profoundly strange. How to take the edge off when the painting is made entirely of edges? They tell me there is a light at the end of the tunnel but if I fix my gaze on it, I see it switch off, then on again. Three seconds on, one second off, and repeat, a flashing beacon that demands to be noticed even when I’m not really looking at it. It dances at the corner of my vision. About a quarter of all allogenic transplant recipients die within the first year. I remember signing the consent form, painfully aware of the statistics outlined above my signature, the risk of having this procedure, the risk of not having it. It’s too late to go back now. Over the past few days the nurses have watched my white cells count down to nothing, sand drip drip dripping through the neck of the hourglass.

Day zero comes round and I feel like zero too, a gaping hole of a person waiting, wishing, to be filled in again. Smile at my parents, smile at the nurses, thank you thank you thank you, smile at the blank ceiling. Smile at my sister, who’s excited, proud, but I can see a hint of blankness in her too. She’s provided the paint that’s going to fill me in again, had a fleeting taste of the life of tubes and cells and needles, a fleeting taste of how it feels to be emptied out by all this. I do not have a monopoly on fear. Still, I am afraid.

When they attach the bag of stem cells to my central line and start the slow trickle, my lungs protest. Even at absolute zero, alive but only just, my body tries to fight for me, to tell me these cells do not belong here. Desperation tightening as I lean forward, trying to draw breath through a storm of coughing. It’s probably only a minute or so before the intravenous antihistamine kicks in but in that one horrible minute I am convinced I am about to be one of the twenty-five percent. The bad statistic. My sister’s stem cells are too good for my dilapidated body to handle.

Miraculously, my airways open again and I am brought dizzy into my new life. It is almost the same as the old one. I am still forced to pull the drip stand around behind me like a ball and chain. The chemotherapy may be over but my IV is still force-feeding me a steady diet of immunosuppressant to persuade my immune system to settle into its new home, steroids and vitamins, fluids and platelets. Like a premature baby, I cannot be trusted to survive alone.

In the 3am electric twilight my vitals are taken and suddenly they need more blood. My central line is playing up so in a sleeping-tablet and chemotherapy induced haze my arms are needled. My veins are fugitives in the night, reluctant to surrender their hard-won treasure. Nobody will tell me what is wrong. I hear the word ‘infection’ and the light at the end of the tunnel blinks out again. About a quarter of all allogenic transplant recipients die within the first year. What a cruel irony, to survive cancer and die from a cold.

The infection drowns in a flood of medical scrutiny and antibiotics. I cry into bowls of spaghetti hoops, coaxed into just another mouthful like a toddler, gulp down sobs and yoghurts because even the pain of swallowing is better than the indignity of a nasogastric tube. I do jigsaw puzzles and doze through Christmas films and smile because even if it’s a lie it’s still better than nothing. I lose count of my thank yous. I insist on showering alone, sit on the floor under the stream of water, and ache for soap that smells of grapefruits and summer, not this antimicrobial wash that smells of science and anxiety. Half of me wants to stand up, let the spots in my vision grow and fill my head and block out the world, even if only for a second. A moment’s retreat from the monotony of this featureless existential hinterland. My shed hair collects in the drain like a dead animal. The end of the tunnel recedes into the distance. I have not moved an inch.

My blood cells begin, sheepishly, to multiply. A beaming doctor calls me a miracle and I smile smile smile, and this time it’s not entirely empty because this means hope – but why can’t I feel the cells bursting into my blood? Why do I still feel so flat and small and hollow? Weren’t they supposed to fill me in?

I am eventually allowed to walk down the corridor. The ceiling stretches away from me like a horizon. I had forgotten how big the world was. I only take about thirty steps, need to rest before I can make the pilgrimage back to my room, but it’s the most exercise I’ve done in three weeks. I look out the window and remember that there is a road out there. In the real world it is Christmas. An overheard carol, like a snowflake, settles on the floor of my heart. I am still empty, but when there is room for freshly fallen snow, maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

***

December 10^th 2017. Day seven hundred and thirty-one. Exactly two years since day zero. I wake up with a scratchy throat, prop myself up in bed and try to cough out all the phlegm that’s built up overnight. My limbs are heavy, head hazy with the cotton-wool of a winter cold. But when I finally swing my legs over the edge of the bed, I can stand up and my vision stays exactly where it was. My legs do not have any trouble holding me up. The shower is a flight of stairs away from my bed; I take them two at a time, crack open the window and breathe in the morning. I shower with soap that smells like grapefruits and sunshine, spray myself with lemons and lavender. I run my fingers through my hair, and it still amazes me that no strands come away in my hands. It reaches my chin now. I don’t think I will grow it any more. This length feels like home.

I feed myself cereal and bananas and yoghurt, and they sit in my stomach like a friend. I wonder if I am coughing too much to go to band practice, but I go anyway, because it’s Christmas and I am not in a room on the Young Oncology Unit anymore. I go because I can. It feels good to go outside without asking for permission. I walk along the river, look up at the cathedral, feel the lightness of my bones. Winter burns my chest but I can warm it away with tea and laughter. I have not had a blood test in eight weeks. At the end of band practice we play through some Christmas carols. They settle into my bursting heart, a sparkling sigh.

Durham is beautiful in the winter. On my way home, I look up at the enormous sky and feel the ground solid under my feet. I smile at nobody and the velvet clouds smile back. As I pass under the beam of a streetlight, a flurry of snowflakes catches the electric glow. In the moment they look like a shower of stars.  I am small in the best kind of way, so anonymous that I could even forget about myself. It’s good to be back.

Heart on my wrist

It's me again, the world's most sporadic blogger. My mind has been a bit everywhere today, probably not helped by my period showing up three days early and screwing up my concentration with cramps and general apathy (yeah, I know I was meant to be probably definitely infertile or something, but all evidence is currently pointing towards a season-six-Jon-Snow situation in the ovary department. Both me and my endocrinologist are as confused as you are). But last night I got back home from the Teenage Cancer Trust's annual conference for young cancer patients and survivors, and there I met someone who had to have a hysterectomy at twenty-four because of a blisteringly rare gynaecological cancer so at this point I should probably just be thankful I still have a womb.

Uterine tantrums aside, after Find Your Sense of Tumour my heart and head are too full for my Ted Hughes tutorial prep (not to mention that I will always love Sylvia with everything I am and I'm not sure how I feel about her infamous man in black). I'm never going to achieve sustained consideration of metrical patterns if I don't make some attempt to empty myself out first. It's all a bit A Lot. Let me tell you about it.

The Teenage Cancer Trust is a slight misnomer really. They help to fund a number of specialist units in hospitals throughout the UK, but they aim their services at the 'teenage and young adult' age bracket which includes those between nineteen and twenty-five too. They run two weekend conferences each year, one for under eighteens, and one for those between eighteen and twenty-five. The weekend was held at the St George's Park Hilton near Burton-on-Trent, where I rubbed shoulders with the England Women's football team and over 160 other young cancer survivors. 

Throughout the weekend there were talks, workshops, and social events. I met another Hodgkin's lymphoma survivor from my unit who is only a year older than me, and someone else who's stem cell transplant was less than a month after mine. I met people who'd had treatments I didn't even know existed (radioactive iodine for thyroid cancer anyone?) and people who'd been diagnosed with cancers I didn't think possible (ocular melanoma!?). Before I went I was slightly concerned that being around so many cancer survivors would plunge me back into the depths of Utter Shit that was my mental state towards the end of my treatment but it turns out this was entirely unfounded - it was incredible. I am so grateful I was given the chance to go.

On Sunday morning, we were shown the premiere of a performance by Toby Peach and Grace Gibson, both theatre practitioners and cancer survivors (Toby also had Hodgkin's lymphoma - it's actually one of the more common cancers among teens and young adults). Toby talked about how getting cancer as a young person is fundamentally different to getting it as an older adult. As an adult, you already know who you are, at least to some extent. If you are a mother, a teacher, someone who has a dog and likes running, a cancer diagnosis is something you can just tack onto the end of that list. At nineteen (the age at which both Toby Peach and I received our initial diagnoses) you're still in the process of figuring that out. You don't have your list yet, so cancer accidentally becomes part of your foundation. This is something I have really struggled with, because I think he is right and I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing, but it's a fine line to walk between honouring the shaping influence your illness has had on you, and being defined by it. I don't want to be The Girl Who Had Cancer but that's something I will always carry with me, something that has shaped the person I am now, something I have no choice but to weave into my personal tapestry. 

Until this weekend I hadn't quite realised how difficult it was to carry this invisible story with me. Most of the people I interact with at uni don't know what I went through when I was taking time out of my degree. I normally tell people I was ill then swiftly change the subject because as soon as you mention the dreaded c-word (no, not that one) people get really freaked out. I don't want to spend my whole life making sure other people aren't made uncomfortable by my diagnosis, so I just keep this enormous, cumbersome truth inside my chest. It lurks next to the scar tissue that used to be cancerous tumours and slowly, gradually, it gets heavier. I am so tired.

This weekend, I got to take it out for a while. It sat next to me. I didn't have to lift it up, it just followed me around like an obedient dog. Everyone else there had a dog too. We wore them on our wrists, in the shape of colour-coded wristbands, and I am still wearing mine, which is orange for lymphoma, even though nobody in the real world knows that's what it means. It feels like a secret code. I hope it reminds me to be braver.

I am a notoriously bad talker. I like writing, I overshare online, but when it comes to saying things with my voice, my words fall over each other and crowd together and I can't make myself clear. Talking about my feelings is The Worst. I know my mum worries about me because of this (sorry mum!) - but try as I might, I just can't bring myself to wear my heart on my sleeve. But maybe wearing it on my wrist is the first step. Someone this weekend said that you share your story when you're ready and you can't rush it, but I've had a taste of what it's like to be that little bit lighter, and I don't want that feeling to go away. I am sure I will always be breaking taboos and contending with other people's unspoken assumptions. But you know as well as I do that those things should never have been taboo in the first place. Nobody ever changed anything by accepting things the way they are. Maybe telling my story is scary but it's also important.

Let me introduce you to my dog.

Abi xx