A year ago today, I became a female eunuch

 Yep, I sure was castrated, alright. My perfectly-functioning gonads were sacrificed for the greater good. They were taken out, squinted at under the bright theatre lights and slopped into a metal dish. I hope the dish was kidney-shaped. There’s something about those kidney-shaped dishes that I really like. They’d be great for serving couscous salads.

 After that … well, it’s a mystery, isn’t it? Who knows what became of my little ovarian friends? Maybe they were fed to lab rats. They might’ve been stuffed into an incinerator. Or someone could’ve dried them out and flogged them off on eBay as truffles. Whatever. I just know that I miss them. A lot. I miss the way I used to have a uterus, too. And a cervix. And a vagina that wasn’t permanently scarred by radiation.

Of course, this isn’t how I wrote about it at the time, oh no. I was funny. And brave. I didn’t go into unpleasant details. Or I just didn’t write at all. But you know what? The last two-and-a-half years of my life — pre, during and post cancer –have sucked, my friends, in almost every department. I have been miserable and on this day of all days, I will not try to put a positive spin on it.

I think back on everything that’s happened in those two-and-a-half years: my sister-in-law dying; a huge falling-out in my family; a holiday that turned sour; the Dreamboat in hospital literally days before we had to pack up and move to Karratha; seven months in a work environment that could only be described as “toxic”; the whole cancer drama; returning to work early and half killing myself trying to do two jobs at once; the Dreamboat back in hospital; more cancer tests and scans for me; passing a kidney stone during my week-long “break” in NZ; more poisonous crap at work … and all I want to do is rent a shack in the remotest part of NZ I can find and sit in it for a month by myself. I don’t want to do anything. I don’t want to talk to anyone. I just want to get away.

Some people, when faced with the possibility that they might not be around in five years’ time, become nicer human beings. I haven’t. Quite the reverse, in fact. I seem to walk around in a constant state of suppressed rage. I’d never wished ill on anyone before, ever. Now I do. I resent all the time I’ve wasted looking for the best in people who are just plain arseholes. I’m furious that I never told anyone who deserved it to fuck off.  I wish I’d been more confrontational. Petty, nasty people are even more unbearable to be around when you’ve been reminded just how short life actually is.

The point about the whole cancer thing is that it never goes away. No matter how well you are, no matter how encouraging the test results, you can never forget that you’ve had it and could get it again. Unexplained aches or spasms or twinges make you fearful. And when all the initial fuss has died down and you’ve had your treatment and you pick up your life again and everything gets back to “normal” … there’s still you and your buried fear.

It’s lonely.

A part of you starts to hate everyone else’s relief because it’s not just that they’re happy you’re okay … there’s also the sense that you represent an unsavoury and uncomfortable problem that they didn’t want to face and that’s now been fixed. And then, when they want to put it behind them and forget anything ever happened, you hate them more … because you can’t.

I could go on and on about this but I’ve already got a headache and I can’t really be bothered writing any more. I guess it’s pretty obvious that on my first gonad-free anniversary I’m angry, bitter and depressed. I suppose it makes a weird kind of sense that the Six Million Dollar Hound is having his op today. Maybe next year we can both get on here and whinge.

 Oh, and for the worst song about gonads ever written, go here. It’s fucking terrible. In fact, it could easily be the worst song, ever. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

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