#44 Milestone reached

Milestones are nice aye. Well at least the good ones are.

But even fucked ones can be worth celebrating. You know, like being diagnosed with stage four bowel cancer but still being alive after one full cycle around the sun.

A whole year later and she ain’t even a little bit dead.

Fuck yeah!

Obviously it hasn’t all been what we’d call a shit hot time though. Marjana’s changed heaps but the key point being she’s still alive to actually change.

There’s been some extreme hairstyle makeovers, heaps of spews and gallons of diarrhoea to compliment the constipation along the way and fuck man, those snorts she now makes when she laughs would shame a wild boar.

This cancer life we now live has changed us all as none of us are the same people we were a year ago. Fact!

Although my first wife is still kinda growly (it’s a wife thing I believe), I have to admit she doesn’t sweat the small stuff like our pre cancer days. It’s really puts things into perspective and that’s actually a positive.

life hack #101 – when ya cat spews up a feed let ya dog eat the spew – two feeds for the price of one

But as I sit here typing away my first wife is laying beside me in pain. She’s got her chemo bottle attached and is crying in agony from stomach cramps thanks to chemo.

This particular blog has taken me fucking ages to write as I know for a fact some of you come here for a laugh as well as an update and no cunt reads these aspiring to get depressed. To be honest though, sometimes I do struggle to find the words to cover off both elements. By that I mean, giving a status update without leaving you, the reader feeling like that Mona Lisa sheila looks in that painting.

I’m trying to write this and wipe away my first wife’s tears at the same time. Being the considerate poor li’l wifey though, she helped me by grabbing a tissue to wipe tears from two pairs of eyes and then whispered how romantic it is to share tear tissues. Fuck man, I’m just happy we’re finally saving money on tissue usage but seriously though, that shit can not not change anyone.

Fuck you cancer! You’re a cunt and can fuck right off if ya don’t mind.

Ya haven’t killed us yet. Came pretty close; but close don’t count for shit.

The ol’ girl has struggled a bit of late with her last few Chernobyl sessions affecting her quite badly. She’s been in heaps of pain and continually fatigued as fuck so even her good weeks ain’t like the good weeks of old.

We recently went to see our surgeon. You know the one… Peter the good cunt. Sounds a bit like one of Jesus’s disciples aye. The first wife even put on her nice perfume and a semi decent pair of undies… Nana undies can be semi decent if they are new and don’t have holes apparently.

We were trying to find out why she’s been in so much pain of late. Still not 100% sure but our oncologist who I’m not allowed to call a gnome, even though he looks like one, gave the ol’ girl an extra week off chemo which, along with a couple more blood transfusions helped our cause.

the power of touch

In fact the day after that decision she surprisingly woke up feeling pretty bloody good and stayed like that for almost a whole week… Sometimes we’ll take what we can get.

It’s fair to say though, we’ve probably been a tad dehydrated of late as too much eye sweat can leave one feeling not very flash at all.

For those who’ve followed these blogs since day one, you’ve no doubt shared a ride with bumps as big as an erect nipple on a lovely perky tit and lows almost as bad as food poisoning the All Blacks in rugby world cup finals. But I’d also like to think that along the way you’ve snuck in a few laughs… and maybe the odd bewildered comment along the lines of ‘Did he really just say that?’. That actually leads nicely into your our quote of the day…

Oncologist: (talking about chemo options) Hopefully we can get that all mopped up.

Me: Oooh yippeee, Marjana just loves mopping and she’s real good at it too.

we don’t always get a menu at hospital but when we do we try and get beer

Going back though to that milestone of surviving an entire year, there are actually a few significant dates we wont forget and we ain’t even sure which one/s to celebrate.

It was back on August 12, 2020 when Marjana woke up with swollen glands, called in sick to work and went to the doctor.

The next few days were an absolute cunt of a time to be honest with the worst being August 19, 2020 when she was officially diagnosed with cancer – stage four metastised bowel cancer to be precise. That’s one mean as memory scar right there.

A few days later came hospital admissions for chemo portal insertion, colonoscopy and ultimately the all important life saving ‘subtotal colectomy’ surgery, which for normal people translates to cutting her guts open, ripping out some cancer tumours followed by a little bit of realignment plumbing and sewing the guts back up.

None of the above were happy times but they are milestones that do deserve to be celebrated. Milestones (at least for me) usually involve drinking a bunch of piss so tend to end up as a good time. I’m sure I read somewhere that this month Virgos gunna luck upon some beer skulls and jager shots but in all honesty it could’ve just been my own fortune telling.

Ideally, I should compile a list of all the people who have helped us through this last year but I refuse because I’ll inevitably leave some cunt off, only to remember after posting the blog. Y’all know who ya are anyway.

People often ask how I’m going and to be honest it’s a cunt of a feeling seeing ya loved one in absolute agony and crying uncontrollably because of it.

It’s also a cunt of a feeling seeing the extreme physical change in ya first wife and not that I give a fuck if she’s getting fat or has fuck all hair or whatever but seeing how it’s affected her with a body aging many years in a single year is what’s sad. It’s not just the body but the emotion and mental state that’s affected her because of it.

To see, hear and experience that is quite simply just a cunt. But it ain’t nothing compared to her living it in the first person.

enjoying the sun

This particular blog wasn’t meant to read like an All Blacks Rugby World Cup loss but real life cancer stories more often than not are unfortunately not usually of the fluffy feel good genre.

Not sure if you’ve heard but there’s this little thing called COVID-19 that also came into the mix around cancer diagnoses time so there’s also that freaky element. Not that we’re the only ones affected by lockdowns and spastics stockpiling toilet paper but one can’t reflect upon the last year without at least mentioning Corona.

If ya are looking for a good time, I do recommend not getting cancer. If, for some reason you did fall victim to it then I personally recommend fighting that mongrel cunt of a thing like their ain’t no tomorrow because one day that may just be the case.

As this particular blog took a few weeks to write, it’s only right that I finish by adding that right now my first wife is actually feeling good this week. So good that we were even able to go on a dump run date together…

it’s Dump Girl

… and go to see this really cool band called Victor Bravo live.

Victor Bravo are (left to right) Ben Cutting (guitar/vocals), Jakeb Brown (drums/vocals), Jack Flack (lead vocals/guitar) and Kodi Winslow (bass/vocals)

Victor Bravo live at The Zoo

#40 Return of the spew bucket

Hard to believe we have reached 40 Cancer Chronicle blogs really.

I remember when I turned 40 I was so pissed off. Seriously man, I wasn’t very happy at all. When I turned 50 though, I was actually happy it. Not really sure what the difference was but in all reality, they’re just numbers anyway.

Whether it’s a number relating to how many times you’ve been around the sun or how many times you’ve clicked ‘publish’ on a blog it still really is just a number… it’s what happens between those numbers that matter.

And in this instance, those 40 posts hopefully have kept y’all updated on the happenings of someone we know and love together and in doing so given you a few laughs in between. It’s certainly done that for us.

Don’t get me wrong though in thinking it’s all fun and games in reliving the comedic reality show in print because as you groupie readers know all too well, there’s been plenty of fucked times too.

Fucked times aint dead times though so even they need to be celebrated. But enough of this philosophical shit and back to real stuff like my first wife’s massive green projectile vomit a couple nights ago.  Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about, man.

It was almost like a back to the future thing with Marjana talking in a monotone robot like voice saying ‘Get me a bucket quick!’.  Now I’m a dumb cunt alright but dumb cunt or not, I still got a memory and recalled the times of old when she says those words in that tone.

Like a treasure hunt expert in an olympic sprint I found a large enough spew vessel in the nick of time and the ol’ girl played her part in not making my giving it to her a waste of time.

She’d had her Chernobyl Day dose of chemo the day prior on Wednesday and woke up on Kodi’s birthday day feeling pretty good. By the time I returned from an ultrasound on our other son Dilan’s ankle she had stomach cramps and has since had had the chemo bottle removed on Friday and now three days later, she still got em.

Kinda sucks and unsure what they’re from.  I reckon it’s a bug and she reckons its from looking at my ugly head so the jury’s is still out on that.

But she’s still getting nausea and shouldn’t be and with vertigo coming back as often as aphids on my plants the little cunts, we’re now booked in to see a Neurologist.

Even had an MRI on my first wife’s head for good measure and when we told Dilan, the conversation went something like this…

Me – Ya ol’ lady had an MRI scan on her brain today to check if there was a brain in there. 

Dilan – Maybe they should do one on your head, Dad.

Me – You little cunt.

Marjana and Dilan laughed like fuck and I begrudgingly told Dilan he may have just made the quote of the day.

Anyway, the scan results showed she does have a brain and it’s alive and in her head. It’s the small things in life, right.

Small things like road trip days to places we never been before.

We been taking Bella to the dog beach a few times a week and the walk there and back can be six or seven kilometres so we might be unfit fat cunts but that ain’t too bad for, well… unfit fat cunts, I suppose.

We’ve also been making a concerted effort to do shit even when the cook ain’t feeling too flash.

We’ve visited some good mates at Sunny Coast and even got to catch up with one of the loudest proudest Aussies I know from way back. We ate food, drank piss and told old rugby war stories from our California days following another mate dying.

San Francisco Rugby Club memory lane

Cuzzie Jase the Ace took the cook on a Harley ride for the day and she dug it. Thanks to Lisa for sharing her man, his bike and her riding gears but fuck did she make me pay by drinking heaps and heaps of my plonk.

That afternoon flowed into the evening in Fortitude Valley where we watched Kodi’s band Victor Bravo perform live for the first time in way too long. It was a primo show with heaps of hot young scantily clad chicks, hip looking muso dudes with finely trimmed moustaches and a couple of beat up old cunts going as hard out as the performing band. These Victor Bravo kids are still finding their feet in both the musical and the real world but they got the goods musically and hoping they manage to find their way through the eye of the needle and make it.

But it’s nice to see ya kids doing what they love. With one it’s music and the other it’s rugby. Except for injuries of course. Injuries suck. Dilan’s a tough little cunt though, I’ll give him that.  Played a full game of school rugby for Iona College and another 15 minutes for the 2nd 15 and rolled his ankle during the second game. Even played the last seven or so minutes hobbling around.

As mentioned before, Kodi had his birthday and the first wife wasn’t feeling real flash but I cooked us a few mean as feeds including my own aptly named butbut style chicken on my new smoker, some American style pork ribs and the following day I smoked some fish (mullet) that I fucked up because mouthfuls of salt ain’t a cuisine I’d like to return to.

This will be one of those ‘I guess you had to be there’ stories but was driving Dilan to school and had Marjana next to me. She might seem nice to y’all but I tell ya what, you do not want to be some old rich cunt living his midlife crises in a small expensive convertible in front of us and not taking off immediately when the light turns green or otherwise you gunna be getting a bit of this (sorry I stopped the recording before she finished her snorting)…  

‘Fuck off you little cunt’

Not really a funny quote of the day but worth the mention when talking about Marjana getting repeated nausea…

Our Oncologist who I’m not allowed to call a gnome even though he looks like one – I guess the best thing we could do is stop the nausea.

Me – I’m thinkin’ probably the best thing could be to cure cancer, maybe.’

Here’s a positive I guess… these blogs have changed from daily updates about staying alive and the intricate moments involved to an almost journal like retelling on us living life. A boring life even. But that has to be a good thing, aye.

Like a couple of Deadheads at a Victor Bravo concert

#18 Gifts for my first wife

The year 2018 included fantastic gifts, some of which could not be wrapped…. like concerts.

Took the first wife to see Bryan Adams (at her request I might add).

Took the first wife to see The Rocky Horror Show (my choice of course).

Plus, our eldest Devil Spawn’s (Kodi) band Victor Bravo released their very first music video to compliment all these musical gifts for my first wife over the year 2018.

Watching ya kids do what they love is a gift in itself and as ‘underground’ as this vid was way back when, y’all can watch it here… https://fb.watch/58ukpkyeWp/

Back to the real gift wrappings soon.