"Requiem For Bewilderment"💗
MY JOURNEY: City of Manchester, Brief Medical Update, Flaunting My Mistakes for good reason, Music inspired, mental health blip, 21 December 2024
If you like your newsletters without politics or preconceptions or seeking a break from the norm you may have just found your new hangout
21 December 2024
Dear Chasers💗
I have been busy (and not busy) since my last letter to you here. Merry Christmas Everybody - if xmas is your kind of thing. (What a dickhead thing for me to say haha! You know what I’m like. Well, I try to be jolly at times but this isn’t my year. So maybe next time. I still wish you all the silent nights and jingle bells and mistletoes and other such missives that I miss so much too.) Let’s put all that aside for now, and if you wish, join me for a minute of two while I check in and update you with things since my last letter in October was it? November? Fucking hell, we did Halloween and now its almost bloody Boxing Day haha!. How fast we evolve. I’ve missed you all and hope you have many wonderful times.
So, apart from my deliberate absence (just over a month) I believe it has been an appropriate reprieve whilst preparing for the news I would receive regarding my suspected cancer condition, I decided to take that time away from writing updates while I was actually going through the motions and procedures involved in the health investigation.
These journeys were so terrifying (so I had to be alone) just travelling to and from the hospitals put me in a quiet contemplative mindset and as I braved the world around me, inside my life was in questionable limbo. I say I had to be alone because when in the company of those I care about, I switch off in to a nurturing and protective mode. I zone out from my own emotions and focus on those of the other person. I appreciated this time to just zone out from the world around me and concentrate on myself.
The look of worry and disconnection was evident on my face! I lost a bit of my cognitive awareness during those hospital visits I went into a daze of my own doing; the first hospital gave me permission to take home the pretty pink gown I had been given to wear (upon my really weird and unreasonable request to keep it). It’s true what they say when they tell you the whole world fades away, you go numb and if your ears are not already ringing with a deafening thudding silence, you just don’t recognise sound at all and just drift through the motions. Travelling in slow motion and progressing through reality on autopilot.
I took photos to send my partner to let him know I had arrived safe and in that moment I saw my late Dad’s image on mine. He always had this same expression, remembering that he suffered from Schizophrenia long before I did, and had been through that during the 90’s when stigma was still rife, he always looked like this. I never realised why. It’s like a haunting and now I understood this expression. He must have been continuously terrified. His resting face and mine here staring back at me is the same level of scary as the situation itself.
It was a very kind gesture of the woman to allow me to take my ‘favourite’ gown away with me saying ‘keep it luv’. She had been the medical assistant who had given me the two gowns before I went it and issued instructions to wear one on the inside and the other to be worn backwards over the top; her smile, when I insisted doing the gowns the opposite way around, to have the pink one as the top layer ‘‘because its so pretty’’ spoke volumes.
That also seemed to be a running theme at the second hospital where I managed to obliviously walk out the doors and back to the tram stop carrying the plastic ‘patients belongings’ bag which housed the paper dignity pants and pale blue smock gown I had worn but should have handed back to the medical assistant. This is NOT true to my nature or anything. I’m far from a kleptomaniac.. maybe if you hold the ‘klepto..’ we might have a point and be a bit closer.
In hindsight I should have extended that ‘leave of absence’ thought towards my other newsletter, which seen me face a few trials and tribulations - including manic mental health breakdown (how evident that is in my writing, I’m not entirely sure). I definitely made some terrible mistakes over there and lost two valuable subscribers. I have no idea who has left me but I place value on all my readers.
You can tell by the level of acrid animosity in my words in the latest 'manic’ newsletter; Close Company (above) that I’m just not my usual self. So I stopped there. But that wasn’t the worst.
I was so afraid to have my bum seen by the doctors that after the camera was put down my throat, I opted out of the colonoscopy on the other side of the operating table. They sent me to another hospital for a CT Colon scan instead. They still had to see everything from behind during that procedure because they insert a short pipe up your back passage and pump gas in to inflate the bowel/colon. It was my worse nightmare and I was so afraid of anyone else seeing my arse. I didn’t bail out on this one and had it done. So, to come home and a week later post a photo of my arse to my followers and the public is just NOT my natural behaviour. I always said that I face my fears head on. Still not proud and I’m actually ashamed of my ‘cheeky flash’.
In my haste to ‘keep on writing’ I was attempting to ‘check in’ every other day over on my supposedly ‘daily’ newsletter & podcast: TheDailyChase my mind, if nothing else, has been vividly alight with an episode of schizophrenia, a change in medication for depression, diet changes - and the only constant I managed to encounter was my rapid decline. I’m not sure how I came across but at least ‘those two people’ actually saw the shift in me and read a side to me they did not find comfortable, pleasant or appropriately written; and triggered their reaction to leave me. I don’t blame them in any way, in fact I appreciate their actions, because it helped bring me back to my senses; like ‘Chasey!! what the hell are you doing?? what were you thinking sending out a photograph image of you backside!?’ **I have now deleted that dreaded picture!** - this is the rest of that post (below)
Results: No Sign Of Cancer. It’s Gastritis. Oral Medication as treatment.
My point is that I have relapsed during the waiting period, I literally only received my results yesterday 20 December 2024. My scan had been on 28 November 2024 and the throat camera procedure earlier than that (they found no signs of cancer with that camera but I do have a sliding hiatus hernia). I am delighted to be given the all clear but I’m numb still. I have to wait for my brain to catch up and clear the unfortunate veil of fog and bewilderment that has caused me to detach a touch from myself and the world around me. I share my heart with you and include my mistakes and the shitty parts of me (not the arse pic god forbid.. so relieved that I had the good sense to take it away) but everything else. I share this with you as a message to myself too. A map to find my way back to the soul, to the true authentic human being I want to be, who I am and remind myself that everything might be temporary, but for now my life isn’t. My life is much more than that. My story is not over yet. Thank you so much for being here with me. x
Kind Regards,
Love Chasey!!x
PS: I always protect my head (with a hat) when I’m a bit temperMENTAL, when I dip I wear a hat (like a twat) its an impulsive reaction and not contrived to take care of my consciousness…. but it’s a good enough sign that I’m not myself. Still, ‘‘LOOK AT ME BEING ALL FESTIVE AND SHIT’’ xxx
EXIT SONG (personal mixtape):
Thank you for everything! BIG soft HUGS!! Chasey Delaney..x
