Inspiring New Year Message from Helen

Hello Lovely Ann

Please pass on my love and gratitude to everyone who’s been supporting me over the last few months and let them know that my spirits are continually boosted by the messages they send.

Quick update is that I had my second chemo on 14th Dec. My intentions for the course are that “I receive the healing gift of chemotherapy with love and gratitude” & secondly that “It’s going to be a breeze”.  Such a different attitude to 5 years ago – its been amazing how the work I’ve been doing (with the help of some exceptional therapists) has given me such strong self belief.  The medics now tell me I have multiple tumours in both lungs as well as infected lymph nodes in my neck & around my trachea, and that the chemo course will be 6 months, with a scan to check progress half way through.  This was a bit of a surprise as we’d previously been told only 3 months.  I’ve told them this treatment is going to work so well I simply won’t be needing the second 3 months (besides I have a mountain to climb in June!).  I’m not sure they believe me.  That doesn’t matter really, because I believe me.  I’ve been feeling pretty good so far, and see myself as a well, healthy person with an amazing future ahead of me.

I wish everyone a happy, healthy & fun-filled 2010.

With love, as always

Helen

Helen is blogging again – read about her adventures at http://helencrowe.net/

(Helen had bowel cancer 5 years ago and last year made a trip to Peru to raise funds for the Bowel Cancer charity. On her return she was diagnosed with a brain tumour which was successfully removed in October. If you’d like to send Helen a message (even if you don’t know her – its OK) and don’t have her details, please just ask me or leave a message here or on her own blog http://helencrowe.net/)

Hello from a recovering Helen

Hello my lovely Ann

I have been thinking about you quite a lot recently – and wanting to get in touch. Recovery has slowed me down over the last few days, which is my excuse & I’m sticking to it! Brain surgery can take it out of a girl, y’know!

 I am doing really well – that’s what I tell myself all the time, even when I least feel like doing it. Each new day is like a mini new life, full of different experiences, and I start each one by saying ‘thank you’ for the gift of that day, whatever it brings. It is such a relief not to have the extreme pains & disorientation in my head any more, and a joy to know that, even though it surprised him (but not me), my brilliant surgeon has removed ALL the tumour. So, in the truest sense of the word, I have ‘lost my sense of tumour’.

Everything is now on its healing course, and I am learning to be a patient patient, and reminding myself to go with the flow of the recovery. One of the biggest lessons I’ve been reminded of is simply not to resist what is. If I feel unwell, that’s OK. We usually resist what we don’t want, which causes us suffering. So if I just accept what is, there is no resistance, and no suffering. Life is so much easier and strangely enough the thing I was resisting seems to go away. That’s been demonstrated so clearly to me over the past few months since the diagnosis, and during/after radiotherapy and now following the operation.

So now I believe it.

Each and every day I am blown away by the love and support I am receiving from literally the four corners of the world. Messages arrive in emails, cards, letters, bunches of flowers, phone calls, word of mouth from the most incredible people – some of whom I know, and some I don’t. Their words inspire me beyond words, and what seems to happen is that the words I receive & read are exactly the words I need to hear at that precise moment in time. How incredible is that?

 I would really love everyone to know the difference they are making to my well-being and my recovery just by keeping in touch.

With love & gratitude, as always to you and to the whole of the Inspired Group.

Helen x

(As Helen says, the messages she gets mean a lot to her so if you’d like to know how to get in touch please just ask me or leave a message here and Helen will read it.)