Tag: depression

Chatting to strangers…

I just met the most lovely woman while at the Kinghorn Cancer Centre. She was a carer and also had a son that was a carer. She was helping her friend through her session at the cancer centre who had no family to support her, and was told her friend will likely die in the next couple of weeks from an inoperable brain tumour. She said she wasn’t used to being around so many sick people all of the time. She was exhausted, stressed and was also worried about her son who is helping a friend who had become a quadriplegic in the last year. He has been refusing treatments and has become suicidal. She’s giving and giving, and worried about everyone else. I stopped and said to her “but what about you?” Although she didn’t fully acknowledge what I said, her eyes welled with tears as she stoically tried to smile through & laugh off the comment.

So many people in the world right now just have no concept of how good they have it. They have their health, they have the ability to use their limbs, to love and be loved, to choose whatever they wish to do with their day instead of being chained to a hospital waiting room for months on end. They have family who support them and never have to truly feel alone. Please choose wisely when you decide how to spend your day today. Fill it with love, not resentment or hatred. Be open and in doing so maybe make someone else’s day a little brighter. You truly never know the pain someone else is going through from a first glance. Even as I write this I have to remind myself of this thought & pull myself back up out of a depression & down week.

Keep rising xoxo

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My Insight SBS article on youth cancer survival…my life stripped bare

For me, my cancer journey has been a life long ordeal. After losing my father to Leukaemia at age nine, a month later I was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin lymphoma and underwent surgery and chemotherapy.

I have always called it my “sympathy cancer”, as I believe it was the stress of losing my father that caused my initial illness. At the time I thought I wouldn’t survive, as the only experience I had ever had with cancer was through my father. All I knew of it was that it was unforgiving, made you so ill that you could barely stand and it eventually would take your life.

But I got through the treatment and after a year I was back at school and recovering quite well. I never thought I would get cancer again. But then at age 24 I heard those words once more. I was a singer, model and designer and again my world came to a screeching halt.

It was cancer, a Wilm’s tumour. I knew it would be months of vomiting and being frail, marking off the days until treatment ended. Unfortunately it was much worse than I’d imagined and at my lowest weight I went down to a tiny 36kg from my initial 55kg. I fatigued walking only a few metres and would get weekly blood transfusions as the treatment started to take its toll. My heart would pound from exhaustion. I had had my kidney removed, started chemo and radiation all at once and ended up with blood clots in my lungs, lost all my hair and had other complications.

I felt completely isolated seeing only my boyfriend at the time,my mother and the hospital staff for many months on end. I needed help dressing, washing, cooking and cleaning. My independence was completely taken from me and eventually it would be the catalyst that would end my relationship.

It was the most trying time physically, emotionally and financially, yet it wasn’t until my final day of treatment came around that the depression and anxiety really began. Cancer is not like a cold or broken leg where you go through your recovery and think nothing more of it. This cancer took from me long after the signs were no longer visible to the outside world. I think while I was going through the hell of it all, I had a purpose and would try to help patients around me not doing so well. But when it finished I felt lost, depressed, alone and different – like an outsider in my own life, bare & exposed. It had caused social anxieties to develop and everything I once found easy had become more of a chore.

But again, now taking almost seven years to recover to an acceptable level, I did finally make it through but with a lot of effort. I was tired, but eventually glad I made it back to health.

I wasn’t as confident now in the thought that I would never get cancer again but I was 80% sure. Again my confidence was shaken and I received a diagnosis after eight years in the clear, I was 32. I had just finished a psychology degree that I chose to begin after my second cancer. I had wanted to help other cancer patients as much as I could after having experienced the unique issues young people go through with this awful illness.

This time it was thyroid cancer.After two surgeries and some radiation treatment,I thought I was in the clear again but unfortunately they hadn’t gotten everything. Within six months I was back in surgery and had all my lymph nodes on one side of my neck removed.

Today, I don’t know if I’ll ever get ill again, or if I’m 100% in the clear but what I do know is that life is so short and fleeting. We need to make the most of every moment we can. Sometimes we don’t get second chances. I’m so grateful to still be standing after all that I have been through.

I am now an advocate for ‘You Can’ a youth cancer organisation for 16-30 year-olds going through cancer and also support young people through an online platform called ‘I had cancer.com’ developed by ‘You can connect’.

It is so important to have someone to speak to and often in these times it can be hard or impossible to find others that truly understand. If anyone you know has been through or is going through cancer or is looking after someone who needs a little social support please suggest CanTeen or www.Ihadcancer.com

I hope one day cancer is a thing of the past, but until then we need to support each other and invest in research, not only for cures, but also for improving outcomes for long-term health complications after these aggressive treatments.

I will be a guest on Insight on Tuesday 20 February at 8.30pm on SBS, which explores how young people get on with life after cancer.

#InsightSBS

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The human condition…

The human condition is one of the most perplexing things there is on this beautiful earth. At the end of the day we seek nothing but connection and love but we look for it in all the wrong places. We have created this consumerist world to make money to afford to buy things that fill the void that we have created & in doing so make ourselves ill. We are told everyday of how we are lacking; on the television, in the magazines, every day in subtle ways and sometimes blatantly obvious slaps in the face by beautifully manicured and polished hands. We lap it up like we need to be told what life is all about & how to live it. Drinking up the poisonous words of some seething corporate greedy bastard entity. We aren’t even fighting people anymore, we’re fighting corporations that can’t even be confronted to be able to fight back. We are just a mere cog in this intricate and grubby new machine.

Anxiety and depression rates sky rocket as our world is supposed to be easier and more accessible, but we sit here and talk to each other through screens and type our incomprehensible expressions of love and anger towards each other and our feelings of urgency & being behind to do what we should have done. For things of love and awe sometimes there are just no words to express what you can only show through human touch or that effervescent twinkle in someone’s eye. No wonder love has become only sex and looking for bank accounts that fit someones lifestyle for some people. Nobody sees each other anymore. We walk past amazing souls each and every day, we sit next to them on the train on the early morning commute to work but we only see our own faces staring back at us, tired and worn in the reflection of our iPhones. We swipe left or right on people’s faces which reduce them to a few lines of text and a photoshopped image. We give our bodies over to strangers in the hopes that superficially being held for a night will fill us up for long enough that we can escape our perpetual feelings of loneliness if only for a moment. While we search for this connection we destroy everything in sight, we knock down reserves to build skywards to climb towards something as close to heaven as we’ll ever find. We destroy each other through our own expressions of hurt, trying to make sense of it all. As they say, “hurt people hurt people”.

But then the flip side, as humans we have this need of love which shows us just how fragile and real we can be. It exposes our soft little underbellies as we grunt and put on that tough guy face and say “I don’t need anyone”. It’s such a sad day to know some will never experience true happiness as they chase these corporate made dreams and subdue that little voice buried deep deep down in the pits of their stomachs. Some appreciate the twinkle of a diamond more than the spark that ignites between two people made for each other – JLF (JaxTrax)

(I’d just like to add, I don’t only see the world in this way, reading back it seems so one sided and negative, this was a mere snap shot of a thought I had while sitting on the train going home from an appointment haha. It’s just showing the cracks in society and the pitfalls we sometimes succumb to unknowingly, if down trodden long enough. It’s more about the lack of connection I felt that day from people around me) hugs. Big love xoxo

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Don’t believe what social media tells you about someone’s life…

I just wanted to post this in hopes that it might make people think a little deeper about our society and how we relate to each other, as well as how mental health gets swept under the carpet due to it still absurdly been thought of as taboo.

OK so my picture here: all smiles and I look like I’m relaxed and calm right?

Well it couldn’t be further from the truth. I have very recently just fallen back into a very deep and dark depression after several years of being OK. As far as social media is concerned though I’m doing great, modeling, loving life, see friends often and have it all sorted so to speak. And I’m not even trying to put forth this image, I’m just posting things to distract myself, it has never been my intention to play make believe with how I am to be perceived. There’s a multitude of images old and new that say I’m acing it in life or at least have a smile on my face 99.9% of the time. Actually right now I’ve slowly been withdrawing from catching up with friends, I’ve been struggling at work but too scared to tell my employee I’m not feeling well and the reasons why, I’ve been looking in the mirror everyday and horrified at what is looking back at me as I feel ugly, used up & exhausted.

I have friends that have unfriended me and people misunderstanding me, I have been so up and down that the only things I can think of to relieve the stress is to imagine if I wasn’t here at all.

Social media has become this thing that although can be a great tool to “keep in touch” with friends in another place, and can bring feelings of togetherness even when we’re hidden away. It also masks very real social problems that our society is beginning to develop about disconnection, lack of community, lack of empathy, division and the reality of mental health issues or reality of real life in general. Nobody is up all of the time, but social media often has people scrolling through and thinking oh wow they have such a great life I have to be more like that or feeling as if they are lacking something because they aren’t perceived this way or don’t perceive themselves this way. It’s not where depression comes from, but it adds to it’s problem & veils it so it is invisible with our now more common way of communicating. My message today is, always, always, always be kind to one another. You never know the battles that someone is fighting behind those supposedly happy Facebook profiles or Insta posts. We live in a smoke and mirrors type of society. Let’s be brave & look a bit deeper & reach out to each other for real every once in a while.

#socialmediaisnotreality #beyondblue #bereal #love #kindness #smilesonlyscreendeep #survivorship

Big love 💜 xoxoxo

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