For those of you who have been with this website since it started – way back here in 2016! – you’ll know that I occasionally share snippets of my life as a Watcher. I’ve filed these posts under the tag: Love in a Time of Chronic Illness:
I’m very excited to announce, however, that the time has come for something more than snippets! NEXT MONTH my memoir, Two Sisters and a Brain Tumour, will be published by D.O.L.L, an independent publisher of Christian women’s literature. Getting to this point has been a 3+ year journey, so I’m thrilled the launch date is coming at last!
What. A. Year. It’s my prayer that you are all able to take some time over the holidays to reflect, grieve and rejoice over 2020. I am planning on doing so soon. But for now, let’s all take a deep breath, and celebrate!
I promised some exciting news before I left on my Sabbatical-Which-Didn’t-Happen. Now it’s time to deliver… and what better time than Christmas? My heart longs for my exciting news to be a gift to you all, dear readers and fellow Watchers. It has certainly been a gift to me. A gift of God’s kindness, a demonstration of his faithfulness.
For a while this year I wasn’t sure I’d even have this gift to offer you, so uncertain was life with COVID and other circumstances. But because of God’s goodness and generosity, I can – and so I pray you will join me in celebration.
Two Sisters and a Brain Tumour: My Christmas gift
What is this mysterious gift, I hear you ask?
It’s this: Next year in August, my memoir, Two Sisters and a Brain Tumour will be published by Elephant House Press!
It is the story of my sister and I, the tumour which changed our lives, and the God who saved them. In 2015 my younger sister was diagnosed with a brain tumour, and my life was irretrievably altered. We went on a tumultuous journey together, and this is the story of that journey – the tears, the laughter, the crazy, quirky things which happen when you’re in hospital for 3 months, and the many kindnesses of friends, family, and strangers alike!
If you’re anything like me, you find ‘hospital stories’ rather depressing, and sometimes dry! I give you my word, I’ve done my best to make sure this story is anything but that. Rather than coming up with a list of ‘lessons learnt’ Two Sisters and a Brain Tumour is simply me opening up the window of our lives for three months, and inviting you along on the journey.
I’ll be sharing snippets of the memoir on the blog up until publication, so here’s three little snippets from the first chapter as an early Christmas gift!
(mock cover)
Excerpts from Two Sisters and a Brain Tumour
A beginning
You can read an x-ray and tell someone they’ve broken their wrist.
You can glance at a CT and tell someone they may have kidney stones.
You can’t study an MRI and tell someone they have a brain tumour.
Even if it’s true.
I haven’t quite finished my final year of radiography, but I still know this much.
**
A phone call
‘Jasmine had her MRI today. You know, the one the doctor -’
‘I know.’
‘Anyway, they gave us the printed out scan right then! All the pictures. Is that normal?’
I shrug out of habit. ‘I don’t know. So there’s no report yet?’
‘No just the pictures, and Emily, I think she has something.’
‘Has something? Has what?’ A brain? Unexpected, certainly, but hardly worth a phone call. I crane my neck. Or a missed bus.
‘I don’t know, I can’t read it properly. I just looked at the brain and there’s something there, and I thought you’d be able to read it. When are you home?’
**
A reassurance
The back of the graffitied bus shelter rubs against the high wall of Rookwood Cemetery. It’s the largest burial ground in the southern hemisphere, according to Wikipedia. Ironic, really. A Health Science University campus, dedicated to saving lives, across the street from an overgrown, sprawling reminder of death.
Annoying little sisters don’t have ‘things in their brains’. The MRI will be normal.
I relax on the metal bench. It can’t possibly be otherwise…
*end excerpt*
Want to read more? For updates and more snippets throughout the year, add your email below.
Don’t worry, I won’t be flooding your inbox. Neither of us have time for that!
New monthly posts will begin again next year, and for now here are some of my reflections on Christmas, the New Year, and holidays in the context of chronic illness:
As the shops get busier and my drive home after a late night shift becomes increasingly well-lit thanks to the current Christmas light epidemic, I’ve decided to introduce a new blog ‘series’.
Love in a Time of Chronic Illness (LTCI)
Many of my posts are either ‘answers’ or ‘explanations’ relating to the difficulties and loneliness-es of loving someone with a chronic illness.
I’ve never proposed to have the ‘only-exclusively-right’ answers to every situation of course. (Unless the Answer is Jesus, in which case I do!) But I write what I’ve learnt and I describe what’s encouraged me.
But for a while now I’ve been nursing a fear that perhaps these posts are portraying me unrealistically.
I hesitate to share this. It’s personal. It’s ‘deep’… and this is in itself is normally an indicator that I shouldn’t post it on the World Wide Web.
We’ve looked at why it’s okay to cry in public and also how to respond. Now this is my story…
My story of public grief (and what it taught me about God and chronic illness)
I believe it’s important.
This experience was one of the times I have seen God teaching me ‘in the moment’. It was a valuable lesson – and so I share it, not for sympathy or scandal, but so you might also see the God I saw that day.
