It’s Easter again. I’ve been thinking about last Easter, when I’d just had my second chemo session, and was whiling away a bit of feeling-nasty time by Googling the medical effects of crucifixion. That searing time seems remote, now.
I’m also thinking about my friend Sue who was diagnosed with ovarian cancer around the same time as me. We went through treatment parallel with each other, in different Sydney hospitals, and finished up at around the same time. We were both sent on our way in remission. But now, just a few months later, Sue’s cancer has come back. She’s back in the chemo chair for another grueling round.
For me, it’s so far so good. Somehow I’ve managed to go from nothing to too-busy, like a tap that can’t just come out slow but is either off or at full gush.
I have been resurrected. I’ve got back into the groove of teaching, which I enjoy.
This time last year I was working on my Waste to Art entry; I’m entering again this year. This year’s theme is waste metal, and I’m back on the 1960s and ’70s ring pulls found on Mt Panorama. I’m still finding a few every time we go up there to walk Bertie. He goes hunting for Maccas scraps and I keep my eyes peeled for ring-pulls. I was going to arrange them on a flat board with little hooks, but I’ve decided to hang them in a mobile. They’ll be painted red and black on the front, with the dirt of Mt Panorama left to cling to the back. They’ll be representing carbon dioxide, one black carbon atom attached to two red oxygen atoms. I might or might not include a found toy car.
On Monday I’ll be heading out to Kandos to help Karen Golland plant pom poms on an empty block of land for Cementa. Oh, the fun! Must take hat and loads of sunscreen!
Anyway, bilbies. An Easter mascot for a country that has a complex relationship to bunnies. A country overrun by rabbits, endlessly working to eradicate them. Better to find a different symbol of fertility and new life. Easter bilbies are cute, almost rabbit like, make nice chocolates. But they haven’t quite taken off, have they? Supermarkets are chockers with rabbits and eggs. The Easter bilby is struggling, like so much of our native fauna.
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I’m feeling the need to add my two cents’ worth about Belle Gibson and the Whole Pantry and the whole sorry story. I’ve done my share of 2am trawling around the Internet on the cancer trail. The trail starts straightforwardly enough on reputable support sites (like the excellent Ovarian Cancer Australia) and then goes off into personal stories (I couldn’t get enough personal stories, at one point) and then, unless you’re careful, you find yourself in the wild and woolly world of wishful thinking. YouTube is bristling with them, these advocates of what a fellow blogger calls fantasy based medicine. Over the past few days I’ve watched a series of YouTube clips – a regular video blog, or vlog – made by a woman who rejected conventional treatment for breast cancer. She described the arguments she’d had with her oncologist, who told her flatly that without aggressive treatment, she’d die. Still, this woman decided to go it alone and try to heal herself through diet. It didn’t work. To her credit, she kept vlogging as things got worse, and eventually admitted she’d gone down the wrong track. “I’m a cautionary tale,” she told her viewers. The last clip in the series was a tribute made by a friend in her honour. And then we have Belle Gibson. Penguin publishers, a variety of women’s magazines, the Apple company … all so “inspired” by the miraculous story of a diet-based recovery from cancer by a photogenic young woman that they neglect to do a bit of basic fact-checking. I’m glad Belle Gibson was eventually outed as a fraud – it appears she never had cancer at all – before her cookbook hit the shelves. I’m glad because people with cancer deserve as much reputable, responsible information as they can get.