If I'm Not Here, This is Where I'll Be

The interesting thing about blogging (at least about book blogging) is that you can feel like you're amazing friends with people, even while you're being able to withhold the biggest things that are happening in your real life. It's a weird relationship, sometimes restrictive and sometimes wonderful, but mostly, at least lately, I've been feeling kind of uncomfortable about withholding information- whilst also feeling like I could use some support from the place where I sometimes feel most at home.

So, here's the deal, and here's my attempt at opening up to some things (ok, one thing) that's happening in my real life. So, three days after Christmas (nice), my mum announced that she'd been to the doctor because she found a lump in her boob, and he referred her to the hospital. Fast forward about 3 weeks, and I'm sitting in a surgeon's office with her while he's telling her that she has breast cancer. Today she's having a lumpectomy and some lymph nodes removed, and her prognosis is very good.

But. It's still scary, and horrible, and I don't really know what to do with myself while all this is going on. Reading is pretty difficult, because it's hard to fully detach myself from what's happening in the real world and just escape into book world, and now I'm going to be taking over household duties while my mum's recovering from her operation. Which I'm fine with, and I don't mind at all, but at the same time, I think I need to try to carry on blogging and expressing myself in that way, because otherwise I might just cook the dinner, hoover, and then sit in a corner rocking for the rest of the day. That's, you know, the optimistic view for the next few weeks!

So. There will be less book reviews, at least for a while (and believe me, this isn't an apology about that because, you know, I gotta do what I gotta do) but I'm thinking that I might start doing weekly updates of my life in the real world- an opportunity to vent about what my real world life has been like for the week, and just an opportunity to kind of decompress from it all. At the moment I think that's something I need to do, but I could just as easily decide that I don't want to go into the potentially miserable reality of my life, and then we'll just never speak of this again. We'll see.

So. That's what's going on with me. Sadly this isn't the first time one of my parents has had cancer, so I'd like to think I'm slightly more prepared to deal then someone who's never gone through it before, and so far that's kind of looking like it's true- I'm definitely a lot more mature than the last time around, and having gone to pretty much all of my mum's hospital appointments with her (cancer? Mainly involves a lot of hospital appointments and people talking and stuff), it definitely takes away some of the scariness and makes it all seem slightly, well boring. But it's still plenty scary, especially today. My mum has been completely amazing so far, and I think that really has a calming effect on everyone else- we see that she's not freaking out about it, and so it would be foolish for us to freak out! There are already 2 cancer survivors in my immediate family, and we're well on the way to having family member number 3 kick cancer in its stupid arse.

So... What's new with everyone else?